Features

Reading

The prompter hangs from the notch on a MacBook, and from the top of the screen on other displays, so you read just below the camera and keep eye contact. Its top corners curve into the notch, so it looks like part of it.

The line you are reading is the brightest. Text above it is dimmed more than text below, so your eye stays on the next words. A thin line along the bottom shows how far through the script you are.

Press Play and the script scrolls at the speed you set. Moving the mouse over the prompter pauses it and shows the controls. When the script ends, the prompter says so; press Play again to start over.

The prompter can be hidden from screen recordings and from screen sharing in Zoom, Google Meet and other apps. Turn it on under Settings › Behavior.

Play or pause

⌃⌥P

Hide or show

⌃⌥H

Slower, faster

⌃⌥← ⌃⌥→

Back, ahead

⌃⌥↑ ⌃⌥↓

Smaller, bigger text

⌃⌥− ⌃⌥=

Scripts

Scripts are kept in a library on your Mac. Switch between them, rename them or write a new one in Settings › Script.

Open a file with ⌃⌥O, or drop it on the prompter or on the Script tab. Lafz Prompter reads plain text, Markdown, Word (.docx and .doc), OpenDocument, RTF, HTML, PDF and Fountain. From a Fountain screenplay it keeps the dialogue and adds the speaker's name in brackets when the speaker changes. To use text you have copied, press ⌃⌥V and it becomes a new script.

Text in [brackets] is dimmed, so that cues such as [pause] or [smile] stay visible and are not read out by mistake.

The first time you open the app, a short tutorial script plays and teaches the main shortcuts as you read it. Show Tutorial Again in the menu bar brings it back.

Open a file

⌃⌥O

From the clipboard

⌃⌥V

Keyboard shortcuts

Press ⌃⌥/ to see every shortcut, grouped, inside the prompter. Press it again, or Esc, to close the list.

When you do something with the mouse that has a shortcut, the prompter shows the shortcut for a moment. Once you have used a shortcut three times, its hint stops appearing.

Global shortcuts can be turned off in Settings › Shortcuts, where you can also set how much each press changes the speed and the scroll position.

Show all shortcuts

⌃⌥/

Voice activation

With voice activation on, the script scrolls while you speak and waits when you pause. The microphone is used only after you press Play, and it turns off when you pause, hide the prompter or reach the end.

Audio is measured for loudness on your Mac and is never recorded. A level meter in the prompter and a sensitivity slider in Settings › Voice help you set it for a quiet or loud room. Before macOS asks for the microphone, the app explains why it needs it.

Appearance

Choose a dark or light theme, and lower the background's opacity to see what is behind the prompter while the text stays solid. Pick a style (default, serif, rounded or monospaced) or any font installed on your Mac. The Automatic font uses a Nastaliq font for Urdu.

Set the text size, line spacing and alignment, the fades at the top and bottom, the width and height of the prompter, its position, and which display it appears on.

Call Assist Experimental

Call Assist listens to both sides of a call. When the other person asks a question, it shows a suggested answer in the prompter, under the question, for you to read in your own words.

Speech is transcribed on your Mac with the speech recognition built into macOS, and the audio is never saved. To write an answer, it sends the recent transcript, your instructions and your knowledge base files to Anthropic or OpenAI, using your own API key. You can also send a screenshot with each answer, or ask it to solve what is on your screen. The privacy policy lists exactly what is sent and what is kept.

A checklist in Settings › Call Assist walks you through the setup: an API key, the microphone, system audio, and, only for screenshots, screen recording.

Check that the people on the call agree to being transcribed before you use it.

Start or stop

⌃⌥A

Answer now

⌃⌥↩

Solve the screen

⌃⌥S

Earlier, later answer

⌃⌥[ ⌃⌥]