PowerPoint Teleprompter: How to Read Your Notes on Camera

PowerPoint has a teleprompter built in. Open Recording Studio with Record > From Beginning, and choose Views > Teleprompter View. Your slide notes then appear above the slide preview, near the top of the screen where a laptop's built-in webcam usually sits. This guide covers the full steps, what the feature does well, and where a separate prompter that follows your voice fits better.

Where to find PowerPoint's teleprompter

The teleprompter is a view in Recording Studio, PowerPoint's recording window. Microsoft gives these steps for PowerPoint for Windows:

1. Put your script in the Notes section of each slide.
2. Open Recording Studio with Record > From Beginning or Record > From Current Slide.
3. Choose Views > Teleprompter View. The Views menu is in the lower right of the recording window.
4. Adjust the font size and the height of the teleprompter area.
5. Turn on Auto-scroll, then rehearse and set the speed with the scroll speed slider.
6. Select Record when you are ready.

The notes for the current slide appear above the slide preview, so your eyes stay closer to a webcam at the top of the screen. When you finish, you can export the recording as a video file. Microsoft says the export is a Full HD 1080p MP4 by default.

Microsoft's instructions for PowerPoint for Mac also include Teleprompter view in the recording window. The auto-scroll and keyboard shortcut details in this guide come from Microsoft's Windows instructions. PowerPoint for the web does not support recording a slide show, so the teleprompter is not there.

What the built-in teleprompter does well

• There is nothing to install. If you already record in PowerPoint, the script is one menu away.
• Each slide shows its own notes, so the script cannot fall out of step with the slides.
• In PowerPoint for Windows, Ctrl + Spacebar pauses or resumes auto-scroll, and Ctrl + Left or Right Arrow changes the speed. F1 in Recording Studio lists every shortcut.
• You can stretch the notes area to fill the screen, and Microsoft suggests adding line breaks in your notes where you want to pause.

Where it falls short

It only exists in the recording window

The teleprompter belongs to Recording Studio. In a live slide show, PowerPoint shows your notes in Presenter View instead, in a pane on the right of your screen, while the audience sees only the slides. The notes wrap in that pane, and a vertical scroll bar appears when they run long. Microsoft also lets you run the show from PowerPoint on your smartphone as a remote and read your speaker notes there.

The speed is the speed you set

Auto-scroll moves at the slider's speed, but people do not talk at one rate. You slow down for the line that matters and stop to take a breath. The scroll keeps going unless you pause it, so you end up watching the text as well as the camera.

A voice-following prompter on a second device

Another setup keeps PowerPoint on the computer for the slides and puts the script on a phone or iPad running a teleprompter that follows your voice, such as VoiceScroll. It listens to you and moves the text as you speak. When you pause to change a slide, or step off the script to answer a question, the text waits, and it picks up where you left off when you return to the script. The voice-controlled teleprompter guide explains how the matching works.

With two devices, PowerPoint records with the computer's microphone while VoiceScroll listens with the phone's or iPad's. We don't recommend running VoiceScroll on the same device as another app that is using the microphone, such as a recorder or a call app. For more on the choice, see phone or computer: where to put the teleprompter.

1. Copy the notes from each slide into one script, in slide order, with a blank line between slides.
2. Paste the script into VoiceScroll on your iPhone, iPad or Android phone.
3. Put the device as close to the webcam as you can, on a small stand just below it or beside it. The closer the text is to the lens, the less your eyes drift.
4. Tap Start in VoiceScroll, then start your PowerPoint recording or slide show, and speak.

By default, speech recognition runs on the device, so your audio stays on your phone or iPad. On Android, that needs the offline language pack for your language. Online recognition is an option you can turn on. Every feature is free for scripts up to 300 characters. A full talk is usually longer than that, and Pro removes the length limit.

On a Mac

VoiceScroll for Mac puts the script just below the MacBook notch, next to the camera, and floats it above other apps so you can read it while you look at your slides. It needs a Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later) running macOS 26 or later, and it does not run on Intel Macs. It can also record your camera and screen itself, so pick one recorder per session: record in PowerPoint and read from a phone or iPad, or keep PowerPoint for the slides and let VoiceScroll for Mac record.

Which one to use

Writing slide notes you can read aloud

• Write the notes as full sentences you will say aloud. The bullet points on the slide are a summary, and reading them out sounds like one.
• Keep each slide's notes short. If one slide needs a long passage, it may work better as two slides.
• Read the notes out loud once with the slides before you record. Lines that look fine on screen often trip you up when spoken.

For delivery in front of a room, see the speech teleprompter guide. For presenting on a call, the video interview guide shows the phone-under-the-webcam setup.