How fast should a teleprompter scroll? Your speed.

Conversational on-camera speech lands around 130–150 words per minute. That's the range to start a fixed-speed prompter in. Go slower (110–130 wpm) for instructional or data-heavy content where viewers need to absorb detail; go a little faster (150–170) for energetic, familiar material.

But those are starting points, not the answer. The right speed is the one that lets you talk normally — and that changes with the sentence, the topic, and how much you pause.

• You rush to catch text that's running ahead, and your delivery speeds up unnaturally.
• You stall or pause awkwardly when the text lags behind what you wanted to say.
• Pauses land in the wrong places because the scroll doesn't know you stopped to breathe or emphasize.
• You manage the machine instead of talking — and that's exactly what reads as stiff on camera.

The way around the words-per-minute problem is to not set one. A voice-following prompter listens to your speech and moves the text at your actual pace, pausing when you pause. There's no speed to dial in, because your voice is the speed.

That's what Lumi's FlowPrompt does — it scrolls as you talk on Mac, Windows, and the web, so a data-heavy section and a casual intro both come out at the right pace without you touching a setting.