What is Voice mode, and when should you use it?

What Voice mode does

The mechanics are deliberately plain. You open a script, switch to Voice mode, and start the take. The words scroll at the speed you set, exactly as they would in the other two modes, and the app captures sound through the device microphone. What you get at the end is an audio file rather than a video one.

The reason this is a separate mode rather than a setting is that the output changes what the screen needs to do. Camera mode has to show you a live preview so you can check framing. Voice mode has no framing to check, so the whole screen belongs to the script — which is the right trade when nobody is going to see you.

The three cases it was built for

Podcast segments. Scripted intros and outros, sponsor reads, solo talk segments, and pickup lines. These are the parts of an episode that are genuinely written down, and they are the parts where reading without sounding read is the whole skill. For structuring a script that reads as speech, our podcast teleprompter guide covers the format.

Voiceover and narration. A narration pass for a video that gets edited later, an e-learning module, an audiobook sample, a demo reel take. In all of these the video is captured separately or does not exist, so recording one alongside the audio was only ever creating a file to delete.

Vocals over your own lyrics. Singing while reading the words is the case that previously forced a two-app workflow — lyrics on one device, a recorder on another, and a sync step afterwards. Voice mode starts both from the same screen. The teleprompter for singers guide covers lyric formatting and scroll speed for a fixed tempo.

Voice mode versus Prompter mode plus a separate recorder

Prompter mode and Voice mode look similar on screen — both are a full-screen scrolling script with no camera preview. The difference is whether the app is recording.

Prompter mode is the right choice when something else is already capturing the sound: a condenser microphone into an audio interface into a DAW, a dedicated field recorder, a webcam, or a video call. Prompter mode records nothing at all, which is the point. It cannot interfere with a chain that is already running.

Voice mode is the right choice when you want the app to be the recorder. That removes the second device and the sync step, at the cost of recording through the device microphone rather than a better one. Which of those trade-offs you prefer depends entirely on what the take is for, and that boundary is worth being clear about.

When Voice mode is not the right tool

It is a teleprompter that records audio, not a production suite, and there are cases where reaching for it would be the wrong call.

• Multitrack or multi-guest recording. There is no separate track per speaker and no remote guest connection. A conversational show with guests needs dedicated podcast recording software.
• A master vocal or a finished commercial read. The device microphone is convenient, not neutral. Anything being delivered to a client or mastered for release still wants a proper microphone into an interface, with the app in Prompter mode showing the words.
• Hands-free scroll control. Voice commands are available in Prompter mode only. Voice mode is using the microphone to record, so it cannot also listen for "next" or "pause" — calibrate the scroll speed before the take instead.
• Anything that needs editing inside the app. Voice mode captures the take. Trimming, levelling, and mixing happen elsewhere.
• Video you will want later. If there is any chance the session becomes a video, record it in Camera mode. You can ignore a video file you did not need; you cannot recover one you never captured.

How to switch to Voice mode

Open Teleprompter-Scrolling Scripts on iPhone, iPad, or Mac and select or create a script. On the playback screen, the mode selector moves between Camera, Prompter, and Voice. Choose Voice and the camera preview disappears, leaving the script and the audio recording controls.

Scroll speed, text size, and text colour carry over from whichever mode you used last, so a script you already calibrated for reading does not need setting up again. Voice mode is free like the rest of the app, with no account and nothing added to what you record. For a side-by-side of all three, see Camera mode vs Prompter mode vs Voice mode.