Updated October 2026
This tool isn't a PowerPoint add-in — it's a separate browser page — but that's actually the simpler and more portable way to prompt a slide presentation: it works the same whether you're presenting from PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, or anything else, with no plugin install and no version compatibility to worry about. Here's how to set it up.
If you're presenting with a laptop connected to a projector, TV, or a second monitor, put your slides in presenter/full-screen mode on the audience-facing display and keep this tool open on your laptop's own screen (or vice versa, whichever your setup makes visible only to you). This is the same dual-screen pattern most presentation software's built-in "presenter view" already assumes — you're just using this tool's window in place of (or alongside) your slide software's speaker notes.
Presenting from a single screen (a laptop with no external display, or sharing your screen on a video call — see the Zoom guide for call-specific tips) is trickier since you can't hide the prompter from the audience the way a true presenter view can. Options: run slides in a smaller window rather than full-screen with the prompter window positioned beside it, or advance slides manually while primarily looking at the prompter and only glancing at a small slide thumbnail — workable for a script-heavy talk where the slides are mostly visual support rather than the thing you're reading from.
Rather than one continuous script disconnected from your slides, it helps to write with clear breaks that correspond to slide changes — even just a short marker phrase per section in your own head as you read — so you can glance at which slide is showing and roughly gauge where in the prompter text you should be. Voice Follow doesn't know anything about your slides; it only tracks the words you've spoken from the script text itself, so keeping script sections aligned to your slide order is on you, not something the tool synchronizes automatically.
Live Q&A breaks the "continuous reading" pattern Voice Follow tracks best. Two practical approaches: pause explicitly before taking a question (the pointer holds position while paused) and resume once you're back on script, or switch that segment to Manual Scroll Speed if you expect a lot of interruption and would rather control the pace by hand than rely on the mic picking back up cleanly mid-Q&A.
If you're presenting from a lectern or standing further from your laptop than a typical desk-reading distance, push the font size up meaningfully — the 42px default is comfortable at arm's length, but a talk where you're standing back from the screen benefits from something closer to the 60–72px range so you can read it at a glance without leaning in.
It doesn't advance your slides, sync with slide notes, or read your slide content automatically — it's a separate script you write and control independently of your slide deck. For a talk that's mostly extemporaneous with slides as the main content, a full word-for-word prompter script may be overkill; it's most useful for the specific parts of a presentation where exact wording matters (a scripted opening, a precise statistic, a legally reviewed disclaimer) rather than the whole talk.