Every teleprompter asks you to pay for your script with something. A screen prompter under the lens costs you your eye-line: the closer your eyes are to the words, the further they are from the person watching. A beam-splitter rig fixes the eye-line and costs you hardware, glass, and a third to a half of your light. Either way, the script lives somewhere your eyes have to be.
There is another way, and broadcasters have used it for decades: put the script in your ear instead of in front of your eyes.
What an ear prompter is
Watch a presenter deliver twenty unbroken minutes to camera, or an actor in a corporate film reel off product names without a cue card in sight, and there is a decent chance they are wearing a small earpiece. The script has been recorded — often in their own voice — and plays back into their ear a beat ahead of their delivery. They listen and repeat. No screen, no rig, no glass between them and the lens. Just eye contact.
The trouble is that this has always been a professional's tool, for two reasons.
The first is hardware and crew. Broadcast ear prompting typically means an IFB earpiece, a playback operator or a foot pedal, and a setup that assumes there is more than one person in the room. None of that exists in a solo creator's spare bedroom.
The second is harder: the tape never waits. A recorded track plays at exactly the speed it was recorded, so if you pause, stumble, or take a breath the recording did not take, you and the track drift apart — and it keeps talking while you fall behind. Actors take weeks of classes to get comfortable with this. The skill they are learning is mostly trust: finding their personal lag behind the tape and holding it steady while performing. It is genuinely difficult, which is why ear prompting stayed on sets and stages and never made it into the tools the rest of us use.
The tape never waits. This one waits for you.
TellyPrompter follows your voice: the highlight tracks the word you are actually saying, so pausing, ad-libbing or going back does not lose your place. Ear prompting applies the same to your ear.
The track plays a little ahead of you, the way an ear prompter should — but because TellyPrompter is listening to your delivery, the track adapts to you rather than the other way round. Pause, and it holds. Ad-lib a sentence, and it waits for you to come back. Go back to retake a line, and it goes with you. The one thing that made ear prompting a trained skill — keeping pace with a recording that will not stop — is the thing the software takes off your plate.
The voice in your ear is your own. You read the script aloud once in a rehearsal, TellyPrompter keeps it, and from then on your takes are you, mirroring you. That matters more than it sounds: matching your own cadence and phrasing is far easier than shadowing a stranger's, and it is your delivery of the script.
How it works
- Write or paste your script as usual.
- Rehearse it aloud once, with ear mode switched on.
- Keep the track. Nothing is captured without you saying so.
- Put in an earpiece and start your take. The track plays into your ear, a little ahead of you, and follows your delivery. Your eyes stay on the lens the whole time. You can set how far ahead it runs — a full sentence, or just a few words.
What you need
An earpiece — anything you already own, wired or wireless, one ear is enough. That last part matters: like everything built on voice following, ear prompting depends on the Web Speech API, which Firefox does not implement. In Firefox the rest of TellyPrompter still works, but voice following and ear prompting do not; Chrome, Edge and Safari are the browsers to reach for here.
No rig, no beam-splitter, no second person, no download, and no account for any of it.
Be honest with yourself about the first take
Ear prompting through an earpiece that waits for you is much easier than the broadcast version — but the first thirty seconds still feel strange. Hearing your own voice a beat ahead of your mouth is a sensation nobody is used to. Give it one throwaway run before the take that matters: read a few sentences with the track in your ear purely to feel how the lag sits, then adjust how far ahead it runs until it feels like being fed rather than chased. Most people settle in within a script or two. Actors spend weeks on this because their tape will not wait; yours will.