Onwords support & FAQs.

Onwords is a teleprompter for Windows that follows your voice. You paste in a script, and as you read it aloud the app tracks where you are and scrolls the text to keep your current line centred on screen.

1. Paste your script into the box and click Start Prompting.
2. Choose your microphone from the Mic dropdown.
3. Click Start Listening and begin reading.

The line you’re reading is highlighted and sits on the guide line across the middle of the screen, with the lines above and below faded back. A marker sits under the word the app has reached.

Windows 10 version 1809 or later, or Windows 11, on a 64-bit machine — plus a microphone. Nothing else: no account, no subscription key, no internet connection, and no runtimes to install first.

Onwords is sold on the Microsoft Store with a free trial, so you can try it with your own script, your own microphone and your own accent before buying. Pricing is confirmed at launch.

Yes. Your script is saved on your computer automatically and restored the next time you open Onwords. You don’t need to paste it again between takes or sessions.

Long enough that it isn’t worth worrying about. The editor shows word count, character count and an estimated reading time as you type, and flags anything beyond about 5,000 words — roughly forty minutes of continuous speech — as unusually long for one sitting. That’s guidance, not a limit.

Not currently — scripts are pasted in, and whatever is in the box is saved for next time.

The app listens through your microphone, converts your speech to text using Windows’ built-in speech recognition, and matches what it hears against your script. It looks at the last several words you’ve said and finds the place that best explains them.

Nothing breaks. The app needs only a few recognisable words to keep its place, so a fluffed line, a filler word or a short unscripted aside won’t throw it off. When it isn’t confident, it holds position rather than guessing.

It will catch up. When what you’re saying stops matching the area it’s watching, the app searches your whole script and jumps to where you’ve moved to. This usually takes a sentence or two.

No — that’s deliberate. The app waits until it’s reasonably confident before it moves, rather than leaping ahead on a single word it might have misheard. In practice the marker sits a word or two behind your voice, which is what keeps it steady enough to read from. The highlighted line is what you follow; the marker is a finer cue.

Usually not. That bar shows raw output from the Windows speech engine, which frequently mangles names, jargon and technical terms. Tracking doesn’t need a perfect transcript — only enough recognisable words to locate you in the script. If the transcript looks rough but the highlight is following you correctly, everything is working as intended.

• Use a decent microphone positioned close to you, rather than a laptop or webcam mic
• Record somewhere reasonably quiet
• Train a Windows speech profile: Settings › Time & Language › Speech, which tunes the engine to your voice and accent
• Speak at a natural, even pace rather than rushing

Onwords uses whichever speech recogniser Windows has installed for your current language. English, French and German ship with Windows; others can be added through Settings › Time & Language › Language & region.

Yes. Tick Two speakers under the script box, select the lines belonging to one presenter, and click Speaker A or Speaker B. In the prompter, each speaker’s lines are tinted — pale yellow for A, pale blue for B — so you can see at a glance whose line is coming next.

Assignments are stored in the script itself as a short prefix (A: / B:), so they survive editing, they’re saved with your script, and you can type them yourself instead of using the buttons if you prefer. The labels are shown in the prompter but are never treated as words to be spoken — Onwords won’t sit waiting to hear you say “A”.

No — and it won’t use two. Both presenters share one microphone. Onwords follows whoever is speaking, so it tracks straight through the handovers. If the second person is off-mic or across the room, it won’t hear their lines and the highlight will sit still until someone it can hear resumes.

Yes. Click Mirror to flip the text horizontally for the glass.

Use the A- and A+ buttons to suit your distance from the screen.

Yes — drag the window to your second display and click Fullscreen, or use View › Toggle Full Screen. The controls stay where you left them.

Yes. Tick Auto-scroll for constant-speed scrolling and set the pace with the slider. Auto-scroll and voice tracking are alternatives — turning one on disables the other.

Click ↻ Restart. This returns to the beginning of your script and clears the live transcript.

Yes. Use the ↑ and ↓ arrow keys to move the highlight a line at a time. You can also scroll with the mouse wheel at any point.

No. Your script stays on your own machine. It’s stored as an ordinary text file in your own user folder, and you can delete it at any time.

Entirely on your computer, using the speech engine built into Windows. Nothing is uploaded, no third-party service is involved, and no audio leaves your machine. Onwords does not use the “Online speech recognition” feature in Windows settings.

No. Audio is processed as it arrives and is never written to disk. Onwords only listens while you have pressed Start Listening.

Yes, completely. Onwords needs no connection at any point, and makes no network calls of any kind.

No. There’s no sign-in, and no account to create.

This is nearly always the microphone selection. Windows’ default recording device is often not the microphone you’re actually speaking into — it might be a webcam, a virtual audio device, or a built-in array pointed at the wrong thing, and the signal from it can be far too quiet for speech recognition to work with.

Open the Mic dropdown and pick your actual microphone by name, then click Start Listening again. If the “Heard” bar starts showing words, it’s working.

Onwords will usually tell you when this is the problem. While it’s listening, a small level meter sits next to the Mic dropdown — it should move as you speak. If nothing usable arrives for a few seconds, an orange No audio detected bar appears across the top of the script. That message means the microphone, not the tracking.

If the No audio detected bar is showing, work through these in order:

1. Check the Mic dropdown is set to the microphone you’re actually speaking into, not “System default”
2. Check Windows can hear that microphone: Settings › System › Sound › Input, and watch the input level as you speak
3. Confirm Windows lets desktop apps use your microphone: Settings › Privacy & security › Microphone
4. Click Stop Listening, then Start Listening again

Scripts that repeat a phrase in several places can occasionally cause this. Use the arrow keys to move the highlight back to the right line, or click ↻ Restart and carry on from the top. Continuing to read will normally also bring it back on its own.

Stop listening first, choose the new device, then start listening again. The dropdown is locked while the app is listening.

The full FAQ documentation goes into more detail than this page. If it isn’t answered there, get in touch with Chaos Created and tell us what you were doing when it happened.