Field notes
Why your teleprompter should follow your voice.
Nearly every prompter now says it listens to you. Almost none of them mean the same thing by it, and the difference decides whether the words on screen are still in the right place thirty seconds from now.
The problem with a script that scrolls
A teleprompter has one job that sounds trivial and is not: keep the line you are saying in front of your eyes. The original answer was a motor and a speed dial. You set a pace, you match it, and for a rehearsed read to camera that works.
It stops working the moment you are talking rather than reading. You take a question. You remember a better example. Someone laughs and you wait for it. You circle back because the last sentence did not land. Every one of those is normal speech and every one of them breaks the assumption a scrolling script is built on, which is that you and the machine are moving at the same speed.
What you do next is the tell. You stop looking at the camera and start managing the prompter, hunting for your place, nudging the speed. The audience sees exactly that, because it looks nothing like thinking.
Three things “follows your voice” can mean
These get described in nearly identical words and are three genuinely different machines. It is worth knowing which one you are buying.
1. Fixed pace
The script scrolls at the speed you set. Nothing is listening. This is the original teleprompter and it is still the right tool for a scripted read where you control the whole take and can do it again.
2. Speech detected
The app listens for whether sound is happening. Talk and the script moves; stop and it waits. This is a real improvement, and it is what most prompters mean today when they say they follow your voice.
Its limit is built into how it works: it knows that you are speaking and not what you said. So it cannot tell that you jumped back a paragraph, that you skipped one, or that the thing you just said was your third point delivered early in different words. It keeps pace with your talking. It has no idea where you are in the document.
3. Word matched
The app transcribes what you are saying and aligns it against the script, word by word. Now it knows your position, not just your rhythm. Wander off and come back and it finds you. Restart a sentence and it follows you backwards. Say your point in words you made up on the spot and it can still recognize the point.
This is the level Tellie works at, and it is the reason the rest of what Tellie does is even possible. You cannot warn someone they are about to run out of room for a point they have not made yet unless you know which points they have made.
What the third level makes possible
Once an app knows where you actually are, a set of things stop being features and start being obvious.
- Marks that check themselves off. Flag the points you cannot leave without making. They tick as you make them, in whatever words you use on the day. Nothing to remember, nothing to glance at.
- Credit for saying it your own way. Give a point an anchor phrase and it counts whenever you say that phrase, even fifty words off script. This is what lets you improvise without losing the thread of what you owed the room.
- A warning while you can still act on it. If a point you have not made will not fit the time you have left, you get told by name, early, rather than discovering it as you run over.
- A debrief afterwards. Your real pace, what you covered, and where you went off script, quoted back. The things you used to learn only by watching the whole recording again.
We call that set Stagehand, named after the one in the wings who knows the running order, never speaks, and has the thing in your hand half a second before you reach for it.
Is there a word for this?
Not really, and that is not false modesty. “Teleprompter” describes the wrong half of what happens here. A teleprompter prompts you: it moves and you keep up. An app that waits for you, follows what you actually said, and helps with things you never asked it to help with is doing close to the opposite.
The word we use for it is unprompter. It is true twice. It is a teleprompter inverted, and it is also help arriving unprompted. We are aware that nobody searches for it. Categories get named after they exist, not before, and this one does not exist yet.
Which one do you actually need?
If you read a finished script to camera, alone, and can do another take, a fixed-pace prompter is fine and you should not pay more for anything else.
If you are talking rather than reading, and especially if the take is live, the question is whether the app needs to know your position or just your rhythm. A discovery call, a conference talk with a hard slot, a lecture you have given eleven times, an audition you cannot redo: in all of those you will go off script, because going off script is what being good at it looks like. The prompter should survive that.
Questions people ask
Is Tellie just for actors and speakers?
Tellie is for everyone. An unprompter helps if you are unsure of the material, or if you might say things differently, or if there are things you must say, or if you need any assistance. That means it helps a creator fitting in a sponsor read. A salesperson on a discovery call. A teacher landing the three points a lesson needs. A manager walking into a conversation they get one shot at. A speaker told at the door that thirty minutes just got shortened to eighteen.
Does word matching mean my voice is sent somewhere?
Not in Tellie's case. Speech recognition runs on your own Mac using Apple's on-device models, in more than 40 languages and regional variants. Your voice and your script both stay on the machine. You can verify it by turning off the network and using the app normally.
What happens if it mishears me?
Nothing dramatic. Matching runs against the whole script rather than the next word, so a misheard word does not derail it; the position updates on the next words it does recognize. Scrolling by hand at any time re-anchors it to wherever you scrolled.
Do I have to mark up my script?
No. A plain document behaves exactly as it always has, and the voice following works without a single mark. The marks are opt-in and there are only three of them: a section, a must-cover section, and an anchor phrase. The scripting guide covers the whole convention in about two minutes.
Will people see it on my screen?
No. Tellie's window is excluded from screen capture by macOS itself, so Zoom, Teams, Meet, screen recorders and screenshots all capture what is behind it. That is a property of the window rather than an integration with any one app, which is why there is no list of supported apps to check.
Find out which one you are.
Tellie is a free Mac app, and it sits in the notch beside your camera. Every new install gets 10 days of Tellie Pro, so word-level Voice Follow and Stagehand are switched on while you find out whether talking beats reading.
Download Tellie