For years I rebuilt the same thing on set, by hand, with whatever was in the room.
A read needs two people. Someone reads. Someone else drives the scroll. The reader can’t do both — they’re looking into the lens, breathing, slowing down on the hard line. If they’re also dragging a slider, the read falls apart. You can feel it the second it happens.
So I’d duct-tape a setup. A laptop on an apple box. A phone clamped sideways. A second person crouched off-camera with the trackpad. It worked. It always worked. But I built it from scratch every single time, and every time it felt like I was getting away with something.
I kept thinking: this should just be a thing. A link I send. Two screens. Done.
So I made it. It’s called Just Read It, and it runs in a browser. Nothing to download. Nothing to install on the talent’s machine — which matters, because half the time the talent isn’t even in the room with me.
One link. Roles live in the URL.
Here’s the whole shape of it. You open a session and you get a link. You send that link to the person reading. That’s it. That’s the setup.
The operator screen is yours — the script, the speed, the font, the width. The reader screen is theirs — just the words, big, scrolling, nothing else. Same session, two views. The role is right there in the URL, so the reader clicks once and lands on a clean full-screen prompter. No login for them. No “create an account to continue.” They click, they read.
You can be in the same room or three time zones apart. The link doesn’t care.
Driving speed by feel, not by guessing a number.
Here’s the part I’m proudest of, and it’s small.
You don’t type in a words-per-minute number and hope. Nobody knows their WPM. You watch the person read, and you nudge. Arrow keys. Up a hair, down a hair. The reader’s screen updates live.
When they hit a dense paragraph and start to labor, you ease off before they even ask. When they’re flying, you give them more. It’s the same thing the off-camera person was always doing with the trackpad — except now it’s a key tap, and you’re watching their face instead of fighting a slider.
That’s the whole job of a good operator. The tool should get out of the way and let you do it.
It works with no WiFi in the room, too.
This one surprised people when I mentioned it.
You don’t always have internet. A locked-down corporate floor. A field shoot. A venue that swears the WiFi works and it does not. So here’s the move: run both screens off one machine. Plug a monitor into your laptop over HDMI or USB-C. Your laptop is the operator screen, the external monitor is the reader screen, and the talent reads off that.
No network. No shared link needed. The room never has to find a signal. It’s just a teleprompter and a video cable, the way it always should have been.
Why the script lives in the session and never on our server.
This is the part that matters to you, even if you’ve never thought about it.
When you paste a script in, it goes to the reader’s screen and it lives in that live session. It does not get saved to a database somewhere. We don’t keep a copy. When the session ends, it’s gone from us — because we never had it to begin with.
I built it that way on purpose. The scripts people run through a prompter are often the most sensitive thing in the building — an unannounced product, a layoff memo, an earnings call, a founder’s apology. That’s not mine to hold. Our whole shop runs on one line: nothing lives on our site except your connection. Your words stay yours. We just carry them between two screens and let go.
That principle is the reason I build anything at all. You can read more about where that comes from if you want the longer version.
Look — I made this because I was tired of rebuilding it on a box at 6am. If you’ve ever crouched off-camera with a trackpad, or wished you could feed a remote guest a script without making them download something, this is the tool I wish I’d had. It’s free. Go run a read.
Make something. Start now.