A teleprompter for tradespeople — site videos with your gloves still on

Work comes from being seen doing work. The next customer finds you in a village Facebook group, a Checkatrade profile, a neighbour’s recommendation — and a two-minute walkaround of a finished job outsells any advert you could buy, because it shows the standard rather than claiming it. The trouble is that talking to a camera is nobody’s trade. And the recommendation thread always asks the same three questions — roughly what does it cost, how long does it take, do you cover our village — which a two-minute video can answer before the phone ever rings.

You know the job cold. The joist span, why the old consumer unit had to go, the fall you built into the patio drainage — none of it needs notes when a customer asks on site. Point a lens at you and the same knowledge comes out backwards, or dries up entirely two sentences in. The knowledge lives in your hands, and the camera only records your mouth.

And hands are the thing prompter apps never thought about. Yours are in work gloves, or covered in plaster dust, or holding a fitting — and every teleprompter that expects a thumb on the screen to scroll, pause or restart assumes a clean, free hand you have not had since eight this morning. Kneeling at a fuse board, you could not reach the phone anyway.

Sites, meanwhile, have no Wi-Fi. A new build has no broadband yet; a garden has a hedge and a skip. Tools that quietly assume a network fail at the exact places your work actually happens.

Most tradespeople wing it in one breathless take: the “ums”, the trailing off, the price forgotten, the areas covered never mentioned. Or they do twenty takes in the lunch break, each one dying at the final sentence, until the video gets posted half-good or not at all. The one that does get posted was usually shot in a single long breath at the end of a job, half inaudible over an angle grinder two doors down.

Some get the office — or a partner at home in the evening — to hold notes beside the camera. The eye-line misses visibly. Others film ten-second fragments between tasks, meaning to cut them together at the weekend, and the weekend never comes.

So the fallback is before-and-after photos with a caption. They work, but they lose the voice — and it is the voice, a person explaining their own work plainly, that makes a stranger decide you are the one to let into their house.

Write the script once, in the van, in the ten minutes before you pack up: what was wrong, what you did, roughly what it costs, how long it takes, and the one thing a homeowner should check on their own place. Talk2Camera scrolls it as you speak — voice follow runs on the device, so a plot with no broadband changes nothing. Pause to point at the joist and it waits; from the moment the take starts, your gloves never need to touch the screen. And the script is reusable capital: the next consumer unit gets the same words with the address and the price swapped, so the ten minutes you spent writing becomes two.

The before-and-after happens inside one clip. Face to camera for the promise, then flip to the rear camera mid-sentence for the evidence — the rewired board with every circuit labelled, the falls on the finished patio, the hedge line — and flip back to close. The recording never stops at the switch, so what the customer sees is one unbroken take. That is the sales pitch: no cut for anything to hide behind.

If the framing wants the phone further back on a stand, a second phone can carry the script beside the lens. The two devices link to each other directly — no site Wi-Fi, no account, nothing of the script leaving the two phones. Two Apple devices connect with no network at all; when pairing with an Android second screen, the Android phone is the one that shows the pairing code — scan it with the iPhone and the two are connected.

The edit is one tool: trim. The timeline zooms until a pixel is milliseconds, so you cut the walk-to-position off the top and the reach-for-the-phone off the end, and the clip opens on your first word. That is the whole edit — posted before the kettle in the site hut has boiled.

A consumer-unit replacement, Friday afternoon. The script takes ten minutes in the van: what an RCBO does in plain words, why the old fuse box failed the inspection, what a swap roughly costs, and which postcodes you cover. The phone goes on a stand in the hallway; the take starts; the gloves stay on.

You explain to camera, flip mid-sentence to the labelled circuits in the new board, flip back, and finish with “if your fuse box still looks like the old one, this is about a day’s work.” One take. Trim the top and tail on the zoomable timeline, and it is in the village Facebook group before you leave the drive.

The video answers the questions that usually cost you three phone calls — price bracket, duration, area — and it answers them in your voice, on the actual job. Two enquiries arrive by Monday, both already half-sold. And unlike the job itself, the video keeps selling it for months after the van has left the street.