An ear prompter app that waits for you

What is an ear prompter?

An ear prompter plays a recording of the script into an earpiece, and you say what you hear a beat behind it. Actors train for it, because a conventional tape runs at its own speed and never waits.

TellyPrompter's ear prompting is different in one way: the read in your ear follows your voice. Pause, and it pauses. Skip ahead, and it catches up.

How does it work in TellyPrompter?

You rehearse the script once. From Compose, open Ear prompting, press Make Ear prompting read, and read the whole script through; your browser asks to use the microphone at that press.

Keep the read, and it plays into your earpiece by itself the next time you press Start take on that script, a beat ahead of you.

A read is made for one version of a script. Edit the script and the app says the read is from an earlier version, and Update Ear prompting read replaces it.

What does it need?

Headphones or an earpiece, in every browser: a read playing out loud goes into the microphone along with you.

Making the read needs a browser with speech recognition, which times the recording to your words. Chrome, Edge and Safari have it, on computers and on phones and tablets alike; Firefox does not. An Android phone cannot make the read, and the app says so rather than trying.

Where does the recording go?

The read stays on the device you recorded it on, inside your browser's own storage. It is never uploaded to us.

Signing in syncs your scripts between devices, not your reads. A read stays on the device that recorded it.

It is deleted when you delete the script it belongs to, and when you use Reset everything.

Where does your voice go?

We never receive your audio. TellyPrompter uses the speech recognition built into your browser and does not operate a speech service of its own, so no recording of your voice reaches us at any point.

Some browsers implement their speech API by sending audio to their own servers — Chrome's is documented as server-based, which is why dictation there does not work offline. Where your browser works that way, your voice reaches your browser vendor under their privacy policy rather than ours, and what they do with it is governed by their terms.

What does it cost?

Ear prompting is part of the free prompter. TellyPrompter is free to use, with no account and nothing to download.

Recording is free too. It is not a paid feature, and nothing it produces carries a watermark.

Pro costs £7 a month, £40 a year or £99 once. It is for the cloud script library: a free account syncs up to five scripts between devices, and Pro syncs as many as you write. Recording is not behind it.