Teleprompter for presentations: what PowerPoint has, and what to use in the room

Zhenya, 30 October 2026, updated 31 October 2026

PowerPoint does have a teleprompter. It lives in the Record window, it shows your slide notes above the slide preview, and in the Windows app it can scroll them by itself at a speed you set. Microsoft describes it for one job: recording a video of your presentation while you look at the camera. For a talk in front of people, PowerPoint’s tool is Presenter View, which shows your notes on your own screen while the audience sees the slides. Those notes stay where they are until you scroll them.

So the first question is which kind of presentation you are giving, because each one puts your eyes somewhere else.

Three kinds of presentation

In a recorded presentation, such as a course video or a webinar you record ahead, you look at the camera, so the words should sit just under the lens.
In a live talk in a room, you look at people. The words sit at the lectern or on a screen at the front of the stage, and you glance at them between sentences.
On a call, you look at the webcam, and the script has to sit near it on the same screen as the call. The guide to reading notes on a video call covers that one.

The rest of this post is about the first two, and mostly about the second, which gets the least help from presentation software.

PowerPoint’s teleprompter, as Microsoft describes it

In Microsoft’s support pages:

You open it from the Record tab, or from the Record button at the top right of the window. On a Mac the same window is called Recording Studio.
In the Record window, the Views menu switches between Teleprompter, Presenter View and Slide View.
Teleprompter view shows the notes for the current slide above the slide preview, so your notes are your script.
In the Windows app, auto-scroll moves the notes by themselves, and you adjust the scroll speed.
PowerPoint for the web does not support recording a slide show, and the teleprompter is a view in the Record window.

That is a fair teleprompter for a narrated deck. Two things follow from how it works. The script is cut into pieces, one per slide, so a sentence that runs across a slide change has to be split. And auto-scroll keeps a speed, so a pause to point at a chart leaves the text moving without you.

PowerPoint details checked on 31 October 2026 in Microsoft Support’s articles on recording a presentation, recording a slide show with narration, Presenter View, speaker notes and keyboard shortcuts for presenting.

What a live speaker gets from PowerPoint, Keynote and Google Slides

All three treat notes as a page you move through yourself. That suits bullet notes, a line or two per slide that you glance at and talk around. It suits a full script less well: one hand is on the clicker, and the other has nothing to scroll with.

PowerPoint’s Presenter View

With a second display, the audience sees the slides and you see your notes. The notes can be made larger with the two font buttons at the lower left of the notes pane. They scroll with a scroll bar, or on Windows with Ctrl and the Down or Up arrow, one line at a time. Microsoft says PowerPoint for the web cannot show your notes during its slide show: for now, you need a desktop version for that.

Keynote

The presenter display shows your presenter notes, with buttons to make the font larger or smaller and to invert the colours. Play, then Rehearse Slideshow, runs the presenter display on your own screen so you can practise with it. An iPhone or iPad used as a Keynote remote can show the notes too. Apple’s guides describe no automatic scrolling for presenter notes.

Google Slides

Presenter view has a Speaker notes panel. Google’s help says Presenter view and full screen at the same time need at least one extra monitor and the Chrome browser. The help pages describe no automatic scrolling either.

Bullet notes or a full script

Most talks go better on bullet notes. You talk to the room, and the notes only remind you what comes next.

A full script earns its place when the exact words matter. A eulogy is one case, where you cannot trust your voice to find the words. A talk in a language you speak less well than your own is another.

A middle way works for most speakers: write out the opening, the closing and the sentence that carries you from one section to the next, and keep everything else as notes. The guide to writing a teleprompter script covers how to write lines you can say out loud.

Where a prompter goes in a room

On the lectern, put a phone or a tablet on a small stand at its top edge, as high as it will sit. The higher the words, the shorter the glance.
At the front of the stage, large venues put a screen on the floor facing the speaker, called a confidence monitor. Any tablet or laptop can play that part at a smaller event.
On the laptop you present from, your slides go to the projector, and the script stays on the laptop’s own screen.

Make the text bigger than feels necessary. At a lectern the words are further away than on a phone in your hand, and you read them in a glance, so a line should hold a short phrase rather than a whole sentence. Look up at the end of each sentence, not in the middle of one. The room gives you time for that.

A room does not keep the camera’s pace

A recording has one pace, set by you. A room changes it. People laugh, and you wait. Someone asks a question halfway through. The clicker misses a slide and you go back. A prompter at a fixed speed keeps going through all of it, so you either chase it or stop and scroll it back by hand, in front of everyone.

There are two ways out. A person runs the prompter for you, which is how stage prompters have always worked. Or the prompter follows your voice: it waits while you are quiet and carries on from the words you say next. The speed guide covers fixed speeds, if you use one.

What Wispim does on a lectern and above your slides

Two paragraphs on the app this site is about. On an iPhone or an iPad at the lectern, Wispim’s Voice mode recognises what you say and scrolls to those words. Stop and it waits; say an earlier sentence again and it scrolls back there. Tap a word to carry on from it, pinch the script to change its text size, and drag it to look ahead. A start delay, off or five, ten or twenty seconds, holds the text still before the take begins. Recognition runs on the device where your language supports it; where it does not, iOS sends the audio to Apple to turn it into text, and the language list shows which languages those are. Sound mode scrolls at a speed you set whenever it hears your voice, and Constant scrolls at a fixed speed.

At a computer, the script sits in a floating panel above your slides. On a Mac the panel stays above every app, full-screen apps included, and you can drag it anywhere and size it; ⌃⌥P pauses and resumes, ⌃⌥F hides and shows the panel, and ⌃⌥T lets clicks pass through it to the slides. A window shows wherever its screen is shown, so set the projector up as a separate display rather than a mirror of the laptop, and keep the panel on your own screen. On Windows the panel sits above slides as well, with a see-through setting; Ctrl+Alt+P pauses, Ctrl+Alt+F shows or hides the panel, and Ctrl+Alt+T turns on click-through. Wispim is free for six prompter takes, which do not refill, with every scroll mode and unlimited scripts, and Pro removes the limit. A rehearsal counts as a take too.

Questions

Does PowerPoint have a teleprompter?

Yes. It is a view in the Record window, which shows your notes above the slide preview and can scroll them at a speed you set. Microsoft describes it for recording a video of the presentation. For a live show, Presenter View shows your notes, and you scroll them yourself.

Can the audience see my notes?

In PowerPoint’s Presenter View with a second display, Microsoft says the audience sees only the slides. The same goes for anything else on your screen: if the projector mirrors the laptop, everything on the laptop is on the wall.

Should I read a speech word for word?

Only the parts where the wording matters. Read word for word, a whole talk tends to sound read. Script the opening, the closing and the transitions, and talk from notes in between.

Can I use my phone as a teleprompter for a speech?

Yes. Put it on a stand at the top of the lectern, make the text large, and choose a prompter that waits when you stop. At a computer, the online teleprompter on this site is a quick way to rehearse in a browser.