Teleprompters will help your audience gaze into your eyes whilst giving your pitch.

Hello and welcome to the Speak PR Podcast. My name is Jim James, and this show is for you if you've got value locked up in your organization and you're just trying to look for some cost-effective and simple ways to communicate that using public relations and other tools. Now, I've been running my own international public relations agency for over 25 years, but I've also built companies on 3 continents. So I've learned how to do public relations for over 500 clients, but I've also made it work for my own businesses. Today I'd like to share some insights on teleprompting and about how we're starting to see people looking into the camera but looking on one side. It's very distracting if we're on a Zoom call or these videos we're watching or making, and when people are reading a script and you can tell if they're not looking into the screen, the solution is to use a teleprompter. Now teleprompting is not just for big television companies anymore. And I'm going to share with you on this podcast some technologies that are available to all of us, in fact. Now, it seems as though the technologies available break down into a couple of different parts. One is a standalone device that can be attached to your camera or standalone, that it becomes in effect a mirror to your device and uses another screen. The second form of teleprompter that I found are those that actually are using your iPad or your phone or the screen on your computer as the screen itself. Now they have different functions in different services, so I'm going to talk about— first of all, I'd like to talk about some of the feature sets that we want to look for, and then I'm going to share with you a couple of apps that I've actually downloaded and I'm going to try. So when we look at our need for teleprompting, what we know is that the teleprompter can be as easy as importing your script and then just clicking play on that script, and you can adjust the speed. So there are a few things to look for in a teleprompt solution, either an app or a standalone. One is remote control. And the teleprompter remote control allows you to then manage the device, the teleprompter, from a distance. You can argue whether you think that's useful or not, but with many teleprompting apps, that is not actually free. It's part of the value-added bundle. So the next feature to look for, and I've been looking for, is how you open the document itself. Now, some are allowing you to open the file that you're going to narrate from the desktop. Some allow you to import it, and some are allowing you to get them from sites like Dropbox, for example. Some are allowing editing of the text and controlling the text, and some have got, for example, a lot of functionality around the font size and color and placements. So that is something to think about, is getting the content actually that you're going to be reading The next is going to be around the screen mirroring. Now it's a useful function if you can have the copy on your own, for example, your own desktop screen where maybe you've got the camera, but then you could also have that repeated onto an iPad, for example, or a phone. The obvious point here is that you really want to be able to look into the camera and have the text as close to the camera as you possibly can. So there are some that I've been trying that are on the iPhone and the iPad app which scroll the text right below the camera itself. So really you're looking at the camera and reading. So screen mirroring, in other words, being able to display this on multiple devices is useful, but I'm not quite sure I understand how valuable it is if you are needing to do that, unless you've got someone else looking at your text for you and maybe editing it as you go along. So this idea of the bookmarks, that there may be some chapters, for example, if you're doing a longer form, maybe a speech or a training course, and you're reading into the camera, some of these softwares allow bookmarking where you can save segments in your script and jump to them later. Maybe you want to repeat them, for example, and some allow keyboard shortcuts, especially these ones that are running on the desktop. And some of them have much less applic— much less functionality. These ones that are on your phone itself have much simpler functionality, but of course price-wise they're also much more affordable, indeed free. Now the next element is automatic speed control. Now this is difficult. I've just been trying to use this one at the minute called Teleprompt Mirror. Which is an online browser-based, and I've had the speed as low as it can go, down at 3. It doesn't say what 3 is, but the number 3, and the text is still going more quickly than I can read this. So automatic speed control is one thing to look for, and a couple of the softwares have actually got voice-to-text pacing so that when you speak, the teleprompter will go at the pace that you speak at, but also then will stop the software moving the text along when you stop reading or speaking. That I can see as being a really powerful feature because what can happen otherwise is a bit like getting on an escalator. You've got your content running away from you and you've got to be pressing pause all the time. And that means that you probably have more editing to do because your eyes are going to be worrying about chasing the text. Another aspect to look for is the resolution settings. So you can have your script on different screen sizes, and you can adjust whether it's wider to the full width of the screen or the full height of the screen. Also whether it's opaque for example, if you're looking at a picture and you're trying to describe the picture, you may still want the text to be there but to be opaque. So the ability to customize the resolution of the text seems to be really useful. And this is also what they call an overlay. So the ability to change the image to have the time elapsed and remaining, or a clock, all that, if you like, almost sort of navigation elements of reading a script, which is so important. Now, the other thing then is you can have on some of the more expensive packages the keyboard and mouse settings, so you can optimize the, the software, if you like, so that you're comfortable and change some of the shortcuts for, you know, playing, for pausing, for jumping, recording, and others. Just like working with any software, we get used to it, and getting used to the teleprompt software seems to be another skill set that we might need to have. Now, on the ones that I've downloaded for the phone and the iPad, they don't have customization, so it's much simpler. But of course, then it's good for short form and for narrow text. But if you're doing, for example, a PowerPoint presentation, you want to speak across the script, for example, of that, then this would be very useful. You want to be able to stop and start, move the screen along. And I think for e-learning, the ability to have this scrolling text where you can command the text pace, starting and stopping, seems to be really valuable. So some of them have also got the ability to control third-party devices you know, wheels or mice or the pens. So you can use different tools that you might like to have to manage the control of your, of your screen flow and the text. So let's just look at a few of those. So you can buy some hardware, which, for example, there's a company called, uh, Bodelin, um, B-O-D-E-L-I-N, that has a teleprompter which goes onto your device and it has this slightly complicated, almost like a submarine periscope effect where it's basically mirror— creating a mirror image of what's on the screen, and then you're able to read the text. There are some others. They should be starting at about $300 plus, and like all these things, the cheaper it is, the more complicated it is to use, but also the less the quality is, it seems. So you pay for ease of use, it seems. Now, a couple of others that I've been trying out myself on my phone today, um, one is called Prompt Smart Lite, uh, and that one has a $19.99 one-time purchase, um, but they're going to a subscription model apparently, um, for the pro version. Now this has this VoiceTrack technology, so that seems to be a killer app for me. It follows your voice, and if you want to stop talking, then it'll stop. You can load content from an email, which is quite nice, and also runs offline because some of them are expecting you to kind of be online, a bit like a sort of a Google Translate. You sort of need to be online for the system to be managing the content flow. So this telepromptmirror.com software, for example, is running on a browser, only works on the Google Chrome. So PromptSmart is one. There's another one called Teleprompter. It's free as a, a light version, and I've been trying that. Also nice, has 3 document imports, and after that you need to upgrade to the $12.99. So PromptSmart Teleprompter, there are 2 that I've been trying and they both basically both do the job very nicely. There's another one called Video Teleprompter Lite. They all sound just about the same name. This one I've been trying today, it's very nice because it's very simple to use, and what I like about it is that you can increase the pace and on the screen of what you're reading. You can record as well whilst you're reading, and that's another difference. Some of these softwares will flow the text for you in the basic version, but you cannot record what you're reading without upgrading. In, in this one that I'm using now, the teleprompter It enables you to record at the same time as to read, and that's nice. And then you have other functionalities if you want them. So that's quite cool, and it has quite a few different, uh, aspects. For example, you can start to do things like export and download the video file that you made. And one thing I thought was particularly nice is that I can download the file with the subtitles. So that would save me a lot of work. So I could actually film a piece to my camera. It would have to only be though on the iPhone or the iPad. It works on Android as well, but I could record my script onto my handphone and download the video and then upload that to Vimeo, for example, or to, um, trylately.com to get social media pieces or across to YouTube. So that's, that seems to have a lot of functionality at the basic level for free, but also then if you want to upgrade, you can export, for example, the timestamps for an SRT file for doing, for example, audiograms. The problem with both of those is they only run on the iOS or Android versions. They're not running on the desktop version. So the software that I've got so far that works on the desktop is called Teleprompter. My first outing with Teleprompter is that it seems fairly complicated. I'm sure it's just me. The interface is not that easy, although it's got a lot of sort of text editing functionality and you can import text. So I'm sure it's just me. You can also record with this, but when you record, the box where the text is is not that close to the camera. So it could just be a settings issue, but what it's meant is that I'm finding that I'm still looking away from the, from the text, and I don't know how I would have that teleprompter, for example, over my PowerPoint presentation. I'm sure it could be done. I need to figure it out. So really, the point is that we are now all of us creating more and more content online, and many of us are doing pre-recorded. And we can now have on Zoom or Webex or Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, we can be giving presentations, for example. At a seminar or a webinar and be looking at the attendees, but at the same time trying to look at our PowerPoint, at the same time trying to look at the script. With the teleprompting software that I'm looking at here and sharing, you'd better look at the PowerPoint and continue to look at the people that are looking at you and be reading at the same time. Doesn't mean that you have to be a presidential campaign nominee to use a teleprompter anymore. The software is getting more and more accessible. Certainly the software that works on the, on the phone is extremely easy to use. The only issue then is, of course, you've got a much smaller device for reading on, and would you be giving a webinar, for example, using your mobile phone? So still some learning to do there, and if anyone's got any experience of the teleprompter software that runs well on a desktop, be it you know the the macOS or on Windows, then please do give us a shout. I shall continue to look. There's more YouTube videos out there as well, but I'm covering teleprompting as a function of public relations because. Increasingly, we need to give presentations or to do interviews or to read, for example, white papers to people that are looking at us on screen. And I found in my own case, I'm looking away from the people who are looking at me, and socially that's not acceptable. It's distracting. So as part of the public relations program where we talk about engaging people through the Speak PR program of storify, personalize, engage, amplify, and know, Engage is about engaging content, and if we're delivering content in person to other people, the— if you like, the basic social skill is to look at people when we're presenting to them. At the moment, we're doing quite often the equivalent of going to a conference or a meeting room, and whilst everyone is facing us, we're facing the door. I want to try and solve that, and the teleprompting software is, I think, one way that we can do that. So I hope this has been useful for you. I'll put some show notes in here, some links to some of these software platforms that I found. If you've got any other tips or tools, then please do feel free, and we'd appreciate if you can share them with us at jim@eastwestpr.com. So in the meantime, thank you so much for listening to this episode. We've now reached our 200th episode. This is our 201st episode. To celebrate, I bought myself a new chair for the shed studio, and I am enjoying this greatly. We've also just about to hit our 6,000th download since I launched the show back in June. So a lot of progress and a lot of content I've been working to share, really, so that anyone that's got value locked up in their organization can release it. Because during this increasingly difficult time with COVID We, I think, need all the help we can get. But also, all of us that know things, I think we have a responsibility to share those things willingly and freely to help those around us. My name is Jim James. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. And until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that if you're sharing and using something or you're reading on the screen, just Investigate using a teleprompter.