Updated November 2026
Getting scroll speed right is the single most common frustration with fixed-speed teleprompters — too fast and you're rushing to keep up, too slow and you're stalling or repeating words while you wait for the text to catch up. This page covers how to set Manual Scroll Speed well, and why Voice Follow was built specifically to remove this problem entirely.
Conversational speaking pace for most people falls roughly in the 130–160 words per minute range, with presentation or narration pace often landing a bit slower — many professional voice-over reads and on-camera presentations sit closer to 120–150 wpm, deliberately slower than casual conversation for clarity. These are broad benchmarks, not rules — your natural pace, the content's tone, and how much emphasis or pausing your script calls for all shift the right number for you specifically.
Manual Scroll Speed's slider (0–120) controls scroll rate directly rather than in words-per-minute, since actual scroll speed also depends on your font size — larger text means fewer words fit on screen, so the same numeric speed setting scrolls through fewer words per minute at a bigger font size than a smaller one. Rather than targeting an exact number, the reliable approach is: start around the middle of the range, read a paragraph of your actual script at your natural pace, and adjust up or down based on whether you're catching up to the text or racing ahead of it. Retest after any font size change, since that shifts the effective reading speed at a given slider position.
Voice Follow doesn't have a speed setting to tune at all — because it isn't scrolling at a predetermined rate in the first place. It advances only as far as you've actually spoken (see how it works), so there's no equivalent of "too fast" or "too slow" to dial in; a faster reader and a slower reader both get text that matches their own real pace, automatically, without either of them touching a settings slider first. This is the core practical advantage Voice Follow has over any fixed-speed scroll, manual or automatic.
Even with the extra setup step, Manual Scroll Speed has real advantages in specific situations: it needs no microphone access (useful for the mic-conflict scenarios covered in the Zoom guide), it works in every browser including Firefox and older Safari versions, and its behavior is completely predictable and repeatable take after take — useful for short, tightly timed clips where you want the exact same scroll behavior on every retake (see the short-form video guide).
Real scripts rarely need one constant pace throughout — a fast-paced intro might slow down for a key statistic, then pick back up. With Voice Follow, this happens automatically since it's tracking your actual speech regardless of how your pace varies section to section. With Manual Scroll Speed, since the rate is fixed once set, matching a script with deliberately varied pacing means either practicing your delivery to match the single scroll rate you've set, or using the Pause button manually at the points where you want to slow down or add emphasis, then resuming.
If your browser supports it (see the browser support notes), Voice Follow is generally the lower-effort choice for most continuous, naturally-paced reading, precisely because there's no speed to calibrate. Reach for Manual Scroll Speed specifically when you need guaranteed mic-free operation, cross-browser compatibility, or highly repeatable behavior across many short retakes.