Last week I wrote about why I built a teleprompter my AI can talk to. I thought I was done. I was not done. Building software is like owning a boat, in that you keep finding new holes to throw time into, except a teleprompter has never once sunk.
So here’s what’s new in Prompter. The headline is that you don’t have to read a script at all any more.
Talking points
Reading a script word for word has one big problem: you sound like you’re reading a script word for word. Viewers can tell. Your eyes do a little side-to-side shuffle, your voice goes flat, and you start to sound like a hostage reading a statement prepared by your captors.
So now you can skip the script. Ask your AI for talking points instead:
“Give me talking points for a two-minute intro to AI and WordPress and put them on my prompter.”
A short list lands on your screen. One point at a time sits on the reading line, with the next one waiting just underneath. You press Listen and talk about the first point however you like. When you’ve covered it, it gets a little tick. When you start talking about the next one, Prompter notices and moves along.
It doesn’t need you to say the exact words. It listens for the important ones, so “AI is changing how websites get built” still counts if what comes out of your mouth is “so AI is basically transforming how sites are made.” If you skip ahead, it follows you. If it ever gets confused, which it will, because it is software, the arrow keys move you on by hand.
It’s like being handed a set of notes by someone who then quietly turns the pages for you. It’s the most natural way to talk to a camera I’ve tried, and I’ve tried most of them, mostly badly.
Edit it right there on the screen
Sometimes you’re mid-take and realise a line is terrible. Before, you had to go back to your AI and grovel. Now you can double-click any word and fix it right there on the prompter, at the same size and in the same spot. Bold stays bold. Press Done and it saves.
You can also highlight some text and right-click it to make it uppercase, bold it, turn it into a delivery note like [smile], add a breath, or delete it. I added this because I wanted to shout one word in a video, and now I can, in capital letters, like a man who has just found a spider.
A floating window for demos
This one’s for anyone who records screen demos. Prompter can pop the script out into a small window that stays on top of everything else, so you can read your lines while you click around the thing you’re showing off. Make it a wide strip under your webcam or a tall sidebar down the side of your screen. It’s still a beta and it needs Chrome or Edge, but it works.
A thing I tried and threw away
For about a day, you could talk to Prompter. You’d say “Prompter, pause” or “Prompter, go back,” and it would do it. It sounded brilliant. In practice, it kept mishearing me, and a teleprompter that might jump back a paragraph in the middle of a take is like a stage manager who occasionally yells “FROM THE TOP” for no reason. So I took it out. Some ideas are better as ideas.
Still free, and now open source
Prompter still costs nothing. There’s no account and no free trial that turns into a bill. The new bit is that the code is now on GitHub under an MIT licence, so you can poke around, borrow it, or tell me where I’ve gone wrong, which people on the internet are always happy to do.
👉 Try it: prompter.space.fast
👉 The code: github.com/jamiemarsland/prompter
Ask your AI for some talking points and talk to the camera like a person. If it moves on at the wrong moment, let me know. I’ll fix it, and then I’ll find another hole to throw time into.
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