Quick start, common questions, and the fix for the handful of things that occasionally trip people up. If you don't find your answer here, the in-app welcome screen will walk you through the first run, and Steve answers email at steve@skytech.io.
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Everything below, demonstrated rather than described. Steve reads the entire video from Tellie while it demos itself, so the script on screen is the product working.
Use the file picker to open a script. Plain text, Markdown, Rich Text, Word, PDF, and Apple Pages all work.
Hit the orange play button. The script scrolls on its own. Set the pace with the speed slider, or the up and down arrow keys.
Look at your camera and read. Tellie keeps the script moving so your eyes stay on the lens, not down on a second screen.
Pro Going further: turn on Voice Follow (the microphone button) and Tellie follows the words you actually say, scrolling to match you word by word, so you can pause, ad-lib, or skip a line.
Getting started
Anyone who has to talk while looking at something other than their words: a camera, a room, or a face on a call. If you are reading off a second monitor, a phone propped against a mug, or a document hidden behind your video window, that is the problem Tellie solves.
In practice that means video creators and YouTubers (mark the sponsor read so you cannot skip it), actors recording self-tapes and Zoom auditions (sides open straight from the casting email, and the prompter never appears in the recording), speakers and presenters (your Keynote notes in the notch, invisible to the room), teachers and lecturers (a lesson plan that holds its place while you take questions), salespeople on discovery calls and demos (a checklist that listens rather than a script to read), anyone on a video call, podcasters, and developers running AI agents, who use the same notch as a status surface. It also ships the OpenDyslexic font, with per-file size and speed, for anyone who finds reading on screen hard.
Who it is not for, plainly: Windows and Linux users (Tellie is macOS 14 or later, with no web version), iPhone and iPad, anyone who needs the audience to see the script (invisibility is the point, though one toggle reveals it for a demo), anyone wanting live captioning or transcription for other people (Tellie listens only to match you to your own document and produces no transcript), and anyone hoping it will write the script (there is no text generation; you bring the words).
Download the DMG from tellieapp.com. Double-click to open it, then drag the Tellie icon into your Applications folder. The first time you launch, macOS may ask "Are you sure you want to open this?" because Tellie is downloaded from the internet. Click Open. (The app is notarized by Apple, so this is a one-time prompt.)
The first time you launch Tellie, a welcome screen walks you through the basics: opening a script, granting microphone access, and starting Voice Follow. You can re-open it any time from the menu bar icon → Welcome.
Yes. Tellie requires an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later) running macOS 14 or later. It does not run on Intel Macs.
At the top-center of your main screen: tucked around the notch on MacBooks that have one, or in the same spot just below the menu bar on a Mac without a notch. When you open a script, the prompter window expands below it, and you can resize it by grabbing the edges.
Yes. Tellie works on any Mac running macOS 14 or later, notch or no notch. On a Mac with a notch (recent MacBook Pro and Air), the prompter tucks neatly around it. On a Mac without one, an iMac, Mac mini, Mac Studio, an older MacBook, or any external display, it lives at the top-center of your main screen just below the menu bar, exactly where a notch would be. Same features, same experience. The notch is just where it feels most at home.
Click Tellie's menu bar icon (the small stacked-lines icon at the top-right of your screen) for the full menu: Settings, Pulse Log, Reset Window, Check for Updates, and Quit. If the expanded prompter is sitting over your menu bar icon, or a menu-bar manager like Bartender is hiding it, right-click (or Control-click, or two-finger click) anywhere on the prompter and the same menu pops up right at your cursor.
Tellie has no Dock icon. It lives in the menu bar and keeps running there even after you close the prompter window, so the next launch is instant. To fully quit, click the menu bar icon and choose Quit Tellie (or press ⌘Q while Tellie is focused).
If you try to drag Tellie to the Trash from the Applications folder and macOS says it's "in use," that's why: the menu bar process is still running. Quit it first using the steps above, then move the app to Trash.
Launching Tellie a second time while it's already running just brings the menu bar icon forward; it doesn't open a new window. If you can't tell whether Tellie is running, glance at the top-right of your screen for the small stacked-lines icon.
Using Tellie
Plain text (.txt), Markdown (.md), Rich Text (.rtf), Word (.docx), PDF (.pdf), and Apple Pages (.pages). Open them from the file picker. Tellie keeps your formatting (bold and italics) and turns your document's headings into sections you can jump to, then lays the text out in a single, scrollable column sized for reading from a few feet away.
PDF support is best-effort: text-based PDFs (the kind you get from word processors or audition sides) come through cleanly, and Tellie uses font size to mark larger lines as section headings so the Tab and 1-9 shortcuts can jump between scenes or character cues. Scanned, image-only PDFs won't work; run them through OCR first (Preview's Edit PDF can do basic OCR on macOS).
Word documents (.docx) load with your headings and formatting kept. Your Word heading styles import as sections you can jump to with Tab and 1-9 automatically, no editing needed. To flag a section as must-cover, type ! as the first character of its heading. The full convention is in the scripting guide.
Apple Pages (.pages) documents open too, automatically. A Pages file is a sealed package Tellie can't read on its own, so Tellie asks Pages to hand over the text: the first time you open one, macOS asks to let Tellie control Pages (allow it once), and Pages opens briefly in the background to read the document. It works with both the older Pages and the new Pages 15 ("Pages Creator Studio"), and you'll need Pages installed (it's a free Mac app). Tellie only displays the text and never edits your document.
Yes. Click the Tellie icon in the menu bar and choose Open Script Folder… (⌘⇧O) to queue every text file in a folder as a playlist. Inside the prompter, the → and ← arrow keys step to the next and previous script, and a small counter in the collapsed notch shows where you are in the queue.
Useful when your material is naturally several documents rather than one: a set of audition sides, a run of takes for the same video, or one file per segment of a show. Each script keeps its own speed and font size, so a change you make for one does not follow you into the next.
Select text in any app, then press ⌃+⌥+⌘+T (Control + Option + Command + T). The selected text lands in Tellie's notch. Tellie stays in the background so it doesn't interrupt your flow; the notch surface shows where the text came from. Click the notch to expand Tellie when you're ready to read.
The first time you use the shortcut, macOS asks for Accessibility permission so Tellie can copy your selection from the source app. Grant it once and future presses are instant.
Nothing selected? The shortcut becomes a no-op so a stale clipboard never lands in your prompter by accident.
Or just paste. Bring Tellie to the front (click its notch or window), then press ⌘+V to load whatever's on your clipboard as a script. Markdown formatting like ## headings is respected. Handy for a quick paste from any app without selecting first.
Send to Tellie uses macOS Accessibility permission to copy your selection for you. If you denied or dismissed that prompt the first time, macOS won't show it again, so you enable it by hand: open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, find Tellie in the list, and turn it on. (If Tellie isn't listed yet, click the +, choose Tellie from your Applications folder, then toggle it on.)
No Accessibility, still no problem: the shortcut works the two-step way. Copy your text first with ⌘+C, then press ⌃+⌥+⌘+T. Accessibility is only what lets Tellie do the copy for you in one step.
On a work, school, or shared Mac where you're not an administrator, the Accessibility list is locked and only an admin can turn Tellie on. Ask whoever administers the Mac, or use the two-step copy method above, which needs no special permission.
Tellie doesn't need to hear you perfectly. Every speech recognizer mishears words, invents words you never said, and drops words you did say, and Tellie expects all three. A word that comes back slightly wrong still matches, and filler like "um" and "you know" is ignored, so thinking noises don't count as going off-script.
If it loses you completely, because you improvised a section, skipped a sentence, or jumped somewhere else, it doesn't guess. It takes what you just said, searches your script for where those words actually occur, and re-locks only when it's confident. You'll notice a brief pause while it catches up, then it resumes. That pause is deliberate: when Tellie isn't sure, it holds its place instead of moving you, because a prompter that confidently jumps to the wrong line is worse than one that waits a beat.
If you want to manually move to a different spot, hover over the prompter window and scroll with your mouse or trackpad until the orange highlight lands on the first word of the sentence you want to read next. Then keep going.
Open Settings → Playback and turn on Presenter Magic, then present your Keynote deck as usual. As you advance slides, each slide's speaker notes appear in Tellie's notch in sync, so you read them while looking straight at your camera. Your audience and your screen recording never see them.
The first time, macOS asks to let Tellie control Keynote (an Automation permission); allow it once. Presenter Magic works with both Keynote 14 and the new Keynote 15 ("Keynote Creator Studio"). For hands-free slide advancing, turn on Voice Follow too and Tellie advances the deck the moment you finish your last line.
Presenter tip: turn on Keynote's pointer. Your notes appear in the notch automatically, but during a full-screen Keynote show the mouse pointer is hidden. So you can aim your mouse at the notch during a show, turn on Keynote's pointer in Keynote → Settings → Slideshow → "Show pointer when using the mouse or trackpad."
Yes. Open Settings and drag the opacity slider. You can take it all the way down to 10%, where the script becomes a faint wisp over whatever's behind the prompter (useful when you want to keep eye contact with a scene partner on Zoom and treat the script as a hint), or keep it at 100% for full readability. Anywhere between works.
Yes. Settings includes a font size control. You can also resize the prompter window itself by dragging the edges, and the text reflows (window resize is part of Tellie Pro).
Yes, but please check your language before you buy Pro. Voice Follow runs speech recognition entirely on your Mac and will not fall back to Apple's servers, so it only works in languages Apple ships an on-device model for. That list is Apple's, not ours, and it is shorter than the list of languages macOS supports overall.
Apple publishes the exact list here: on-device dictation languages. It currently covers more than 40 languages and regional variants, including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Vietnamese, Malay, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Cantonese.
Not currently available on-device, so Voice Follow cannot run in them: Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Croatian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Greek, Catalan, Hindi, Indonesian, Portuguese (Portugal) and Chinese (Taiwan). Note those last two: Portuguese works for Brazil but not Portugal, and Chinese works for the mainland but not Taiwan. If your language is on this list, Voice Follow will not work for you, so please don't buy Pro for it. The teleprompter itself works in any language.
If you already bought Pro and your language turns out to be unsupported, email steve@skytech.io and you will get a refund, no argument.
Two further honest notes. Accent handling comes from Apple's recognizer rather than from Tellie: what Tellie adds is tolerance, so a sloppy transcript still tracks. And word-level Voice Follow is tuned for languages that put spaces between words, so it's solid in English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic and the like. Chinese, Japanese and Thai don't separate words with spaces, and tracking is weaker there today.
By default, no. Tellie marks its window as excluded from screen capture using a documented macOS API. Your script is invisible to Zoom, Google Meet, FaceTime screen share, QuickTime screen recordings, and screenshots. This is the privacy promise; it's why most users pick Tellie.
If you specifically want Tellie to be recordable (to make a demo video, share a screenshot on social, or show a friend how it works), you can opt in temporarily. See the next FAQ entry for how.
Yes, with an opt-in. By default Tellie is invisible to Zoom, screen recordings, and screenshots (the privacy promise). To make Tellie visible temporarily for a demo or social share, open Settings → Privacy and turn on Make Tellie visible in recordings (this session). A confirmation dialog reminds you what changes; click Make Tellie Visible to confirm.
While it's on, an orange eye icon sits in the upper-right of the prompter as a continuous reminder. Click the eye any time to hide Tellie again (one-click, no confirmation needed for the safe direction).
The setting resets to off every time you quit Tellie. That's intentional: a forgotten toggle can't accidentally leak a script in tomorrow's real Zoom meeting. If you want to record again, re-enable it.
Yes. Click the detach icon in the upper-right of the expanded prompter (it looks like a rectangle with an arrow pointing out). Tellie pops off the notch and floats anywhere on any screen. A slim grab bar appears at the top of the window; drag the bar to position Tellie where you want it, and resize from any edge. The position is remembered next launch.
To pin back to the notch, click the pin icon on the right end of the grab bar, or just collapse the prompter (⌘⇧E or the close-X). Collapsing always re-pins first, so the mini notch widget is always at the notch (never floating in dead space).
If the screen Tellie was floating on disconnects (you unplug an external monitor), Tellie quietly snaps back to the notch on the main screen.
Yes. Voice-follow is optional. You have two manual options:
Auto-scroll at a fixed speed. Click the play button and use the speed bar (or the up and down arrow keys) to dial in the pace that matches the way you read. Tellie scrolls steadily and you focus on delivery.
Free scroll. Leave the mic off and scroll the script yourself with your trackpad or scroll wheel, the same way you would in any document.
Every script with headings gets a section navigator along the bottom of the prompter. It names the section you are reading now, and clicking it opens the whole script as a list so you can jump straight to any part of it. Handy when a question sends you back three sections, or when you are rehearsing one passage over and over.
From the keyboard: Tab moves to the next section, Shift-Tab to the previous one, the number keys 1 through 9 jump straight to that section, and ` (backtick) peeks at the next section's name without moving. If Voice Follow is listening, it re-anchors wherever you land, so you can jump mid-take and keep talking.
All of this is free, and it works with the headings you already have: ## in a Markdown script, or your normal heading styles in a Word, Pages, or PDF document. A script with no headings simply has no navigator.
Stagehand
Add a couple of quiet marks. Start a section with ## and Tellie can jump to it and track it. Write ## ! instead to mark a must-cover section: skip it and Tellie tells you. Put a line reading > key: a phrase under a ## ! must-cover and Tellie counts that section covered whenever you say the phrase, even while you improvise off-script. A time budget is optional (minutes: 15 in a front-matter block at the top).
None of this changes a plain script: with no marks, nothing new appears. In Word, PDF, and Pages your headings already import as sections, and you flag a must-cover heading by typing ! as its first character. The full convention is in the scripting guide.
Stagehand shows a quiet coaching strip below your controls where Tellie tells you what it noticed about your take: how many of your must-cover sections you have hit, and a warning if an important one is about to run out of time. It appears only when there is something worth saying, then shrinks back. Only you can see it; like the rest of the notch, it is invisible to your audience, Zoom, and recordings. It shows up only for scripts that use the ## ! marks.
When you mark a section as must-cover (## !, see the scripting guide), its text warms from amber to green as you cover it, so you can see what you have hit without looking away from the words. A pip in that strip fills in as well. Plain sections do not change color.
Tellie learns your speaking pace as you talk, then looks ahead at the must-cover sections you have not reached. If they will not fit the time you have left, either the minutes: budget you set or Tellie's own estimate from your pace, it warns you quietly, by name, early enough to speed up. It stays silent while you are on track.
When you finish a take (turn the mic off), Tellie shows a short report: your pace and real words per minute, which must-cover sections you hit, and exactly where you went off script, with the words you skipped. No score theater, just the notes. Turn it on or off with Show Take Debrief in Settings.
Troubleshooting
First, confirm the microphone permission is granted. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone, and make sure Tellie is in the list and toggled on. Then quit and reopen Tellie.
If the mic is on but Tellie still isn't tracking, check whether the script you loaded actually matches what you're reading. The matcher needs at least a couple of words in common to find your place.
This shouldn't happen because Tellie is notarized by Apple, but if you see it: right-click the Tellie app in Applications and choose Open from the menu. macOS will show a confirmation dialog with an Open button. Click it. You'll only need to do this once.
macOS may have silently denied the microphone permission. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone and look for Tellie. If it's not there, quit Tellie, relaunch, and click the mic button again to re-trigger the permission prompt.
Three things to check. First, make sure Presenter Magic is on in Settings → Playback (it's a Tellie Pro feature), and that the slide you're on actually has speaker notes.
Second, Tellie needs permission to read Keynote. The first time, macOS asks to let Tellie control Keynote; if you denied it, macOS won't ask again, so turn it on by hand: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Automation → Tellie, and switch on Keynote.
Third, if you're on the new Keynote 15 (it's a separate app called "Keynote Creator Studio"), macOS treats it as its own app, so you may get a fresh "allow Tellie to control Keynote Creator Studio" prompt the first time. Allow it. Keynote 15 support shipped in Tellie 1.4.5; if notes still don't appear, make sure you're up to date (menu bar icon → Check for Updates).
From the menu bar icon, choose Reset Window. This sends everything back to defaults: window size, position on the MacBook notch, scroll speed, and font size. Or drag the edges of the prompter window to resize it manually if you only want to fix the size.
Sorry! Email steve@skytech.io with a description of what you were doing when it happened. Tellie doesn't send crash reports automatically (see the privacy page), so the only way Steve knows is if you tell him.
Updates
Tellie checks once a day for a new version. When one is available, you'll see a dialog with the release notes and an Install button. Click it, and Tellie downloads, installs, and re-launches itself with the new version.
You can also trigger a check manually from the menu bar icon → Check for Updates.
Yes. Every release shows its notes in the upgrade dialog when you check for updates. Steve also writes about new features and the story behind them in the AI for the Rest of Us newsletter at stevechazin.com.
Tellie is free to download and use. Every new install gets 10 days of Tellie Pro so you can try everything, and after that Tellie keeps working as a full free teleprompter. Pro is an optional one-time purchase. If a future feature is genuinely heavyweight (for example, cloud sync, which Tellie does not have today), it might be a paid add-on, but the core teleprompter stays free.
Every new install gets Tellie Pro switched on for 10 days. There is no card, no sign-up and nothing to cancel: it is simply on, so you can try Voice Follow, Stagehand, Presenter Magic and the rest on your own scripts before deciding anything. Tellie will quietly remind you as the days run down, and never in the middle of a take.
Tellie becomes Tellie Free, which is a complete teleprompter: open your script, scroll it, resize it, stay invisible to recordings. The Pro features switch off, nothing is deleted, and you can buy at any time to turn them back on. Tellie will never end your trial in the middle of a take, so if you are mid-read when the clock runs out, you finish the take first. More about what stays and what stops.
Open Settings and find the Tellie Pro card at the top, then paste the license key from your purchase email and click Activate. Activation is checked once and then remembered, so it keeps working offline. If the key will not take, check you copied the whole thing, including any dashes.
Yes. One purchase covers 3 Macs, so your desktop and your laptop are both included. Activate each one with the same key from your purchase email.
Tellie Pro is $29 once, no subscription. Recognition runs on your Mac and there are no servers costing us money per user, so we charge once, the way Mac apps used to work. Every Tellie 1.x update is free forever via auto-update. And if Pro does not work out, email steve@skytech.io within 14 days for a full refund, no questions asked.
Tellie Pulse is the second screen that listens. It's the strip that drops down under the notch to show you what's happening, without taking over your screen or stealing focus. It listens to your Send to Tellie shortcut, to your Keynote presentation in Presenter Magic, and to your terminal and AI agents. Each source gets its own line with its name, so a glance up tells you what just happened.
When several sources are active at once, Pulse becomes a little mission-control surface: the strip shows the most recent line with a +N badge, and you hover to peek the whole roster. Click any line to expand the full prompter, or hover and click the × to dismiss it.
That's Tellie Pulse quietly showing you something. When you send text to the notch (or an app or tool sends you a line), a small strip drops down with the source's name. It doesn't take over your screen or steal focus; it just sits there so you can glance at it. Click it to expand the full prompter and read, or hover over it to peek without expanding.
If several sources have sent lines, the strip shows the most recent with a +N badge; hover to see the whole list.
Hover the strip and click the small × in the corner to dismiss it. Sent lines also clear on their own after a while, so a stale message never lingers. To collapse an expanded prompter back to the bare notch, click its close button.
The Pulse Log is your history. Tellie Pulse shows what's happening right now; the Pulse Log keeps a private record of what arrived at your notch, so you can scroll back through your day. It's handy when an agent or tool flashed something by and you want to see it again.
It records what is sent to your notch: text you send with Send to Tellie or paste in, and pulses pushed by your apps, scripts and AI agents through the tellie:// URL scheme. Documents you open in the prompter are not logged (opening a script isn't a pulse), and neither are Tellie's own system notices.
Find it in Tellie's menu-bar menu under Pulse Log (it appears once you've used the Pulse surface). The menu shows the last 24 hours, up to 20 entries; the daily files behind it are kept for 30 days. You can open recent entries, open the full history, or clear it. The log is local to your Mac, never leaves your device, and old entries clear themselves automatically.
Email steve@skytech.io. Steve reads and answers every message himself, usually within a day.
Email SteveEverything on this page describes a free Mac app. No account, no subscription, nothing to cancel.
Download TellieFree Mac app. Every new install gets 10 days of Tellie Pro.