Field notes
Your calls and your decks: what Tellie does where.
Two questions arrive constantly, and they have opposite answers. Does Tellie work with Teams, or Webex, or Meet? Yes, always, and the app you use genuinely does not matter. Does Tellie work with PowerPoint the way it works with Keynote? No, and it is worth being exact about why.
The call app never matters
People assume Tellie must integrate with Zoom, because that is how these things usually work. It does not, and that is the good news.
The prompter window is marked as excluded from screen capture by macOS itself. Not by Zoom, not by a plugin, not by a setting you have to remember. The operating system simply does not hand that window to anything asking for your screen. So the question "does it work with X" has the same answer for every X: your audience sees your face and your slides, and never the words you are reading.
| What you are doing | Does Tellie stay hidden | Anything to set up |
|---|---|---|
| Zoom | Yes | No |
| Microsoft Teams | Yes | No |
| Webex | Yes | No |
| Google Meet | Yes | No |
| FaceTime | Yes | No |
| Slack huddles | Yes | No |
| Screen recording (QuickTime, OBS, Loom) | Yes | No |
One row would have done. The point is that there is no list to maintain, because the hiding happens a layer below all of these.
It also does not want your microphone to itself
The other half of "the call app never matters" is that Tellie does not fight your call for the two things it needs. Zoom can hold the microphone and Tellie still hears you: macOS lets more than one app read an input device at once, and Tellie never asks for exclusive access. Your meeting audio is untouched.
And Tellie does not need to be the app you are using. It has no Dock icon and never takes focus, so your call stays frontmost, your keyboard still belongs to it, and the script keeps following your voice in the background. You are not alt-tabbing to a teleprompter in the middle of a sentence. You are just talking.
That is a consequence of a decision made early rather than a lucky accident. Tellie captures audio through a path chosen specifically so it keeps working for an app that lives in the menu bar instead of the foreground.
The deck app does matter
Here the honest answer is narrower, so here is the line drawn plainly.
Presenter Magic reads your speaker notes out of Keynote and puts the current slide's notes in the notch, changing as you advance. It works with Keynote and with the newer Keynote Creator Studio, because Tellie talks to both. Your notes were already written; they simply appear where your eyes already are.
PowerPoint and Google Slides do not do this. Tellie cannot read their notes, so nothing arrives in the notch automatically and nothing advances with your slides. This is a real gap and not a configuration you have missed.
| Deck | Hidden from the room | Speaker notes appear automatically | Notes follow your slides |
|---|---|---|---|
| Keynote | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| PowerPoint | Yes | No | No |
| Google Slides | Yes | No | No |
Google Slides runs in a browser, which puts its notes out of reach entirely. PowerPoint is a native Mac app, so it is a question of work we have not done yet rather than a wall.
So what do you do if your company runs on PowerPoint?
Something less clever that works today: paste your notes into Tellie and read them as one script, while PowerPoint does the slides. You lose the automatic sync. You keep the part that matters most, which is that you are looking at the camera instead of down at a second screen, and nobody can tell.
Two things make that better than it sounds. Voice Follow scrolls the
script by listening to the words you actually say, so you are not hunting for your place
after an interruption or a question. And a couple of quiet marks turn a flat script into
one that tracks you: write ## ! on a section you must not skip and Tellie
makes sure you reach it, greens the text as you cover it, and warns you if you are going
to run out of time before you get there. The
scripting guide is two minutes long and includes a ready-made
script to start from.
Questions people ask
Does Tellie work with Microsoft Teams?
Yes. The window is hidden from screen capture by macOS rather than by an integration with any one app, so Teams cannot see it and neither can anyone you are sharing with. There is nothing to configure for Teams specifically.
Does Tellie work with Webex, Google Meet or FaceTime?
Yes, for the same reason. Every call app behaves identically here, because none of them are involved in the hiding.
Can I use Tellie with PowerPoint?
You can read a script in Tellie while presenting in PowerPoint, and PowerPoint will not see the prompter. What you do not get is automatic slide-by-slide notes: Presenter Magic pulls speaker notes from Keynote only. With PowerPoint you paste your notes in and read them as one script.
Does Tellie show my Google Slides speaker notes?
No. Google Slides runs in a browser, so there is no way for Tellie to reach its notes. Tellie still works as an invisible prompter beside it.
Will people on the call see Tellie?
No. The prompter does not appear in screen shares, screen recordings or screenshots. If you want it visible on purpose there is a per-session toggle, and it resets when you quit.
Try it on your next call.
Tellie is a free Mac app. Every new install gets 10 days of Tellie Pro, so Voice Follow and Presenter Magic are switched on while you find out whether this fits the way you work.
Download Tellie