How to use a teleprompter without sounding like a robot

Week one with a teleprompter, I looked like an elevator voice announcement: eyes scanning sideways, mouth chasing words, nobody home.

The tool wasn’t broken. I was treating it like karaoke lyrics — staring at text, forgetting a person was on the other side.

Place the gear before you tweak settings

My unfancy setup:

Camera (or phone) near eye level
Scrolling text as close to the lens as you can manage — not at the bottom of the display
Sit back far enough that you can skim with peripheral vision while the lens gets most of your gaze

If the words live by your shoes, your eyeballs dive. Viewers only see “they’re reading the floor.”

Speed: slow beats frantic

I used to crank scroll speed so I wouldn’t “run out of words.” Then I ran out of air.

Now I open the teleprompter, read once without recording, and lock a pace where I’m not chasing. Mid-take I’ll slow more often than I’ll speed up.

Rule of thumb: if you finish a sentence short of breath, you’re too fast.

Font size: no squinting, no Morse code

Too small and you lean in — nostrils for days.
Too big and every line is three words; rhythm shatters.

I aim for: sitting upright, no lean, still readable. Exact pixels depend on your screen. Ignore magic numbers.

Pauses are allowed

At periods and question marks, I take half a beat. If the prompter keeps moving, I pause it — or I leave blank lines in the script on purpose.

Robot energy often means “text never stops, so my mouth never stops.” Humans hesitate. That’s fine.

One job while recording

Not “pronounce every syllable.”
“Did that sentence make someone nod?”

Miss a word? Stop. Restart the sentence. Don’t salvage a broken take and poison the mood. Recording with the teleprompter helps because the script and camera share one page — less mental juggling.

A five-minute warm-up

Paste your own 60-second script
Two teleprompter read-throughs, camera off
Third pass: record only the first fifteen seconds
Playback: are the eyes drifting, or mostly lens-ward?

Still drifting? Move the text toward the lens and drop speed one notch. Usually fixes half the problem immediately.

A teleprompter isn’t there to turn you into a newscaster. It removes “what’s next?” from your brain so you can spend energy on tone.

When you forget the words are scrolling, you’re finally using it right.