How fast should a teleprompter scroll? There is no right number — because scroll speed is really your reading speed, and the honest answer is that the scroll should follow your read rather than the other way round. Any fixed number you pick is a guess about how you will happen to speak in a take you have not performed yet.
This article explains why the question is harder than it looks, gives you the orientation figures people usually want, and lays out the three honest ways of setting a prompter's pace — in order of how much each one asks of you.
Why there is no right number
Speaking pace is not a constant, even within one person reading one script. You slow down for the point that matters and speed through the connective tissue. You pause when a sentence deserves it. You stumble, back up, and say the line again. A nervous first take runs faster than a warmed-up third. And pace shifts with language, with script density, and with how well the words fit your mouth.
A fixed scroll speed flattens all of that into a single average — and then makes you perform to the average. Set it slightly fast and you spend the take chasing the text, clipping your pauses because pausing costs you your place. Set it slightly slow and you stretch your delivery to fill, which produces its own strange, syrupy cadence. Either way, part of your attention is doing arithmetic against a conveyor belt instead of talking, and that divided attention is most of what audiences hear as a wooden read. We have a whole guide to reading naturally, and the scroll-speed guess is the villain of much of it.
So when someone asks for the right words-per-minute setting, the truthful reply is: the right speed is whatever you actually do in the take, and no prior number equals that.
The figures, for orientation only
They are still useful as a sense of scale, so, loosely: conversational English tends to sit somewhere around 130 to 160 words per minute, presenters often deliberately sit a little under their conversational pace, and dense or technical material wants to be slower than chat. Treat every such figure as orientation, never a target — pace varies by speaker, language and script, and performing to a number is precisely the trap this article is about.
The genuinely useful number is not universal but personal: what your script costs in minutes at your pace. TellyPrompter measures read-time from your own rehearsal rather than assuming a universal rate — read the script once in rehearsal mode and you know what it really runs, which is worth more than any rule of thumb when you are deciding whether a script fits the video you have planned.
The three honest ways to set the pace
A fixed scroll, when the material suits it. Constant mode — a steady words-per-second you choose — is the traditional approach, and it is genuinely fine for some jobs: short pieces, scripts you have read before, speakers who have learned to ride a scroll the way newsreaders do. Its cost is the one described above, and the cost grows with the length of the take and the newness of the script. If you use it, rehearse at least once at the set speed, and resist the urge to set it optimistically fast.
Sound-level scrolling, the halfway house. In sound mode the script advances while you are speaking and holds while you are silent, with a sensitivity control. It removes the worst failure of a fixed scroll — the text sailing on through your pause — without needing speech recognition at all, which also makes it the strongest option on browsers that lack one.
Voice-following, where speed stops being a decision. In voice mode, speech recognition listens as you read and the highlight tracks the word you are actually saying — through pauses, ad-libs, skipped lines and backtracking. There is no speed to set because there is no speed: the script moves exactly as fast as you speak, including not at all. Speech recognition runs on the device and the audio is never uploaded. Two honest limits: it depends on the browser's speech recognition, which Firefox does not provide — constant and sound modes work everywhere — and recognition quality is the browser's rather than ours, so it varies by platform, language and microphone. The full comparison of following versus scrolling goes deeper on when each earns its place.
So: what should you actually do?
If your prompter only scrolls at a fixed rate, do not look up a number — derive yours. Read the script aloud once, time it, set the scroll from that, and re-check whenever the script or your energy changes, because the figure is only ever true of the rehearsal it came from.
If the speed question is one you would rather stop answering altogether, use a mode where it does not exist. That is not a trick of framing; it is the design position this product is built on. A prompter should follow the speaker, and never ask the speaker to follow the app — and "how fast should it scroll" is exactly the question that disappears when it does. If you find yourself torn between memorising and prompting, that guide picks up where this one ends.