Search for teleprompter speed and you will be told 140 words per minute, because that is roughly the average rate of conversational English. It is a true number and a misleading one, because almost nobody speaks at the average and no one speaks at a constant rate.
Here is a more useful way to think about it.
The numbers, for reference
- 110–130 wpm — deliberate. Instructional content, anything technical, anything an audience needs to write down.
- 130–150 wpm — conversational. Most talking-head video, interviews, explainers.
- 150–170 wpm — energetic. Ads, trailers, short-form social, anything competing for attention in the first two seconds.
- 170+ wpm — auctioneer territory. Works only for deliberate effect, and not for long.
Useful rule of thumb: at 140 wpm, a 60-second video is about 140 words, or roughly a page and a half of double-spaced script.
Why the average will mislead you
Two problems. First, individual variation is enormous — a naturally fast speaker forced down to 140 wpm sounds sedated, and a naturally slow one pushed up to it sounds panicked. Second, and more importantly, nobody speaks at a constant rate. You slow down for the point that matters, speed up through the setup, and stop entirely to let something land. That variation is most of what makes speech sound like speech.
A fixed-speed teleprompter cannot accommodate any of that. It gives you one number for the whole script, and every place your natural delivery disagrees with that number is a place you have to correct yourself instead of talking.
Finding your own number
If you are going to use fixed-speed scrolling, calibrate it rather than guessing:
- Take 200 words of your own writing — your real script, not a sample paragraph.
- Read it aloud at a pace you would be happy watching, and time it.
- Divide 200 by the minutes taken. That is your rate, on your material.
- Set the prompter slightly below it. Being fractionally ahead of the text feels comfortable; being behind it feels like drowning.
Do this on the actual script, because your rate is not a fixed property of you. Dense technical material comes out 20 wpm slower than a personal anecdote, from the same person on the same day.
Adjust for the format
- Short-form vertical video — faster than feels natural. Attention is the constraint, and the first two seconds decide whether there is a third.
- Long-form to camera — slower. Fifteen minutes at social-media pace is exhausting to watch.
- Anything instructional — slower still, with real pauses after each step. The viewer is trying to do the thing while listening.
- Non-native audiences or captions off — slower, and shorter sentences.
Or stop picking a number
The reason this question is hard is that it is the wrong question. You are being asked to predict, in advance, the speed at which you will deliver a script you have not delivered yet.
Voice-following scroll removes the prediction. The prompter listens to what you are saying and keeps your current line in the reading position, so your rate is whatever it turns out to be — faster through the setup, slower on the point that matters, stopped while you think. There is no number to calibrate and nothing to fight.
Fixed speed still has its place: when a piece has to land inside an exact runtime, a metronome is genuinely what you want. For everything else, letting the text follow you is simply better than getting the number right. See how it works.