Best Teleprompter for an iPhone

A teleprompter uses a piece of angled two-way glass, called a beamsplitter, mounted in front of the lens. Your script is displayed on a screen below the glass, which reflects the words back up to you, while the camera behind the glass sees straight through to you. Because the text appears to float over the lens, you can read it while looking directly into the camera, so you keep natural eye contact with your viewer.

Everything that makes prompted delivery look natural comes down to one thing: how far the text sits from the lens axis.

A beam splitter rig solves it properly. The glass sits at 45 degrees in front of the lens, the phone lies flat below it with the script mirrored, and the camera shoots straight through the glass while you read the reflection. Your eyes land on the lens itself, which is why broadcast presenters can hold a camera's gaze for ten minutes. The teleprompter has worked this way since the 1950s.

Without a beam splitter, the fix is distance. Put the reading phone as close to the lens as you can and then back the whole rig away from yourself. The angle between lens and text is what the viewer notices, and it shrinks as you move further back, which is why a prompter that looks obvious at arm's length looks fine from two metres.

Two setup details do most of the remaining work. Mirror the text if you are reading off glass, because the reflection reverses it, and every prompter app has a mirror toggle for exactly this. And get the reading surface level with the lens rather than below it: reading downwards reads as shifty on camera in a way reading slightly upwards does not.

If you film on the iPhone itself, a compact beam splitter built for phones is the best value. The phone sits in a clamp behind or below the glass, a prompter app scrolls the script, and the whole rig folds down small enough to live in a camera bag. Most of these rigs take a second phone or a small tablet as the script screen, so an old iPhone you no longer use becomes the prompter display.

Three UK-available options cover the range. We compared them on published specifications and UK prices at the time of writing (November 2026); none of the figures below comes from our own testing.

NEEWER X1 Pro II: the phone rig to start with

The NEEWER X1 Pro II (a 9-inch metal phone teleprompter from Chinese accessory maker Neewer) costs £134.99 on Neewer's UK store. Its glass passes 75% of the light to the lens, Neewer quotes a reading range of 2 m, and a magnetic clamp holds the phone in landscape or portrait. Neewer lists iPhone 17, 16 and 15 compatibility on its UK page, although the Amazon UK listing title mentions only Android, so check your model against the clamp before ordering.

The bundled RT113 Bluetooth remote drives the free NEEWER Teleprompter app: play, pause, scroll speed, page turns and font size. That remote only works with Neewer's own app, which matters if you would rather run a voice-paced app instead.

Desview T3: the cheaper all-rounder

The Desview T3 (a portable, plastic-bodied beam splitter from prompter brand Desview) takes iOS or Android phones and small tablets and comes with a Bluetooth remote. UK camera retailer Campkins Cameras lists it at £119.00 and Amazon UK carries it from Desview's own European store. Several Desview T3 listings exist on Amazon UK with different maximum device sizes, so confirm the listing covers the phone or tablet you plan to read from.

Elgato Prompter: when the iPhone is not the camera

The Elgato Prompter (a desk teleprompter with its own built-in screen) costs £279.99 on Elgato's UK store. It has a 9-inch 1024x600 display behind 70/30 glass, weighs 690 g and reads to 1.8 m. The catch for iPhone users is that it runs from a Windows or Mac computer over USB-C, Elgato says phone support varies by model, and no phone clamp comes in the box. It is a webcam or mirrorless-camera tool first. Our Elgato Prompter review covers it in more depth.

The app matters as much as the glass, and the main split is between apps that scroll at a fixed speed and apps that follow your voice. Voice-paced scrolling removes the hardest part of prompting, which is setting a speed you never have to chase.

Teleprompter.com (a voice-paced prompter app for iPhone and iPad) has VoiceGlide, which scrolls as you speak and stops when you pause. On the UK App Store Pro costs £89.99 a year or £4.99 a week, with a £299.99 Max plan above it. The free tier records and includes VoiceGlide, but exports carry a watermark until you subscribe. It also accepts a wide range of remotes, from an Apple Watch or a second device to Bluetooth keyboards and foot pedals.

PromptSmart Pro costs £29.99 upfront on the UK App Store, with optional in-app purchases. Its VoiceTrack follows your pace and holds its place when you go off-script, though it works in English only. It needs iOS 16 or later after the October 2026 update.

For a free start, Telepromptr has a free tier with an eyeline mode that sits the script near the selfie camera, and Cueprompter runs in a browser with no install or account. One check before pairing any free app with glass: in some free apps, including Teleprompter Apps Ltd's Teleprompter, mirrored text is a paid feature, and a beam splitter is unreadable without it.

If your main camera is a mirrorless body or a webcam on a desk rather than the phone, an all-in-one prompter such as the Elgato Prompter is the easier long-term tool. It builds its own screen into the housing, so there is no phone to mount or mirror, and it can show a script, notes or a video call reflected over the lens. The trade is cost and a cable: at £279.99 it costs about twice a phone rig, and it needs a computer to run. If you already own a spare iPhone or iPad to act as the script screen, the phone rig is the cheaper route by a wide margin.

There are three tiers, and the jump between the first two is much bigger than the jump between the second and third.

The honest guidance is to start at the top of that list rather than the bottom. A prompter app costs nothing to try, and it tells you whether you actually like reading to camera before you buy glass. Plenty of creators find they deliver better from bullet points and never need the hardware.

The trick is to not sound like you are reading. Write your script the way you actually speak, in short, plain sentences, and set the scroll speed a touch slower than you think you need so you are never chasing the text. Look through the words to the lens rather than scanning them, glance away occasionally as you would in conversation, and record a practice pass to settle your pace. A little rehearsal turns obvious reading into natural delivery.

Match the scroll to your natural speaking pace rather than trying to match your pace to the scroll. Conversational delivery sits somewhere around 130 to 150 words a minute for most people, and presenting to camera usually lands at the slower end because you are enunciating more.

The practical method is to record yourself reading a paragraph at a comfortable pace, count the words, and set the app to that figure. Then leave it alone. Chasing a scroll that is slightly too quick is the single most common reason prompted delivery sounds rushed and flat.

How the script is formatted matters as much as the speed. Short lines with hard breaks at natural pauses read far better than justified paragraphs, because your eye grabs a whole line at a time. Many creators go further and prompt from bullet points rather than full sentences, reading the idea and then saying it in their own words, which keeps the delivery loose while still preventing the mid-take blank.

Three things surprise people, and none is a reason not to use one.

Glass costs you light. A beam splitter passes only part of the light through to the sensor and reflects the rest, so the image is darker than the same shot without it. In a well-lit room this is a non-issue; in a dim one it means opening up or adding light.

Reflections land on the glass. A bright window or a lamp behind the camera will show up in the beam splitter, and the usual fix is the hood most rigs include, or moving the offending light rather than the rig.

Close range still shows. Beam splitters put the text on the lens axis, but at very short subject distances the eye movement across a line of text is still visible. Shorter lines and a slightly longer working distance both help.

The broader limitation is editorial rather than technical: a prompter makes you accurate, not interesting. Scripts written to be read tend to sound written, and the creators who use prompters well generally write the way they speak first, then prompt from that.

The apps are where most of the movement is. Teleprompter.com shipped version 13.2.3 at the end of October 2026, a week after 13.2.2, and PromptSmart Pro's 4.1.2 update raised its minimum to iOS 16, which rules out older iPhones stuck on iOS 15. The hardware has been steadier: the Elgato Prompter is still £279.99 direct, and phone rigs sit at £119 to £135 at UK specialist retailers, with Amazon UK prices moving week to week.

None of this is new territory. Bodelin launched one of the first iPhone prompter rigs in 2009, as TV Technology reported at the time. What has changed is the software: voice-paced scrolling now does the job a human prompter operator once did.

Start with a free app on a spare phone beside the lens and find out whether you like prompting at all. If you do and you film on the iPhone, a phone-clamp beam splitter is the next step, and a voice-paced app is worth more than an upgrade in glass. Buy the Elgato Prompter only if your main camera sits on a desk and a computer is already beside it. Good light matters more once there is glass in front of the lens, so our guide to a portable lighting kit for Reels is the natural next read.