Tellie 1.5 adds Stagehand: the points you promised to make check themselves off as you say them, a warning arrives while there is still time to fix it, and every take ends with an honest read of what you actually covered.
FAIRFAX, VA. Steve Chazin, a former Apple and Cisco product leader, today released Tellie 1.5, a major update to the free Mac teleprompter that lives in the MacBook notch and follows your voice instead of scrolling on a timer.
Every teleprompter ever made answers one question: where are you in the script? Tellie 1.5 answers a harder one. It knows what you have covered, what you have skipped, and whether the clock still allows the thing you promised to say.
Mark a section you cannot leave without saying, and it turns green as you cover it. Add a key phrase, and that section still counts when you improvise past it in your own words, which no other prompter can score. If a marked section will not fit in the time you have left, Tellie names it and offers to jump you there, while you can still act. When you stop, it shows your real pace, what you covered, and exactly where you went off script. Chazin calls the category an unprompter: a teleprompter prompts you and you keep up, while Tellie waits for you and helps unprompted.
"A teleprompter watches the page. Tellie watches the take," said Chazin. "The moment that convinced me was seeing it turn a section green while I was nowhere near the words, because I had made the point my own way. That is not scrolling. That is understanding."
Every new install now gets 10 days of Tellie Pro with no card, no sign-up, and nothing to cancel. When the ten days end, users land on a full free teleprompter rather than a locked screen.
Tellie has passed 1,500 downloads and 95 paying customers across more than 100 countries since late June, including working film and TV professionals who found it on their own. "It truly is a magnificent app," said Sprague Theobald, a two-time Emmy Award-winning writer/producer and actor whose credits include Law & Order, Only Murders in the Building, and FBI.
Everything stays private. Speech is matched on-device using Apple's speech framework, in more than 40 languages and regional variants, and no audio ever leaves the Mac. The window is invisible to Zoom, screen recorders, and screen sharing unless the user deliberately makes it visible. There is no account and no telemetry.
Chazin spent 30 years in tech but never wrote production code. He built the first version of Tellie in three days, about 4,000 lines of Swift, entirely by talking to an AI agent, during a visit to his granddaughter in Vermont, working while she was asleep or at school. He named the app after her. Her name is Ellie, and she is just learning to read.
"Code is cheap. Judgment is dear," Chazin said. "I did not type a line of it, and I am proud of every decision: where the window sits, how it disappears, what is free, what it should never do. The eyes were always mine."
Tellie 1.5 is available today at tellieapp.com and runs on macOS 14 or later. The app is free, with 10 days of Pro included for every install; Tellie Pro is a one-time $29 purchase with no subscription.
About Steve Chazin
Steve Chazin spent 30 years leading product and marketing at Apple, Cisco, Salesforce, and Alarm.com, where he was rehired personally by Steve Jobs in 1997 and helped grow WebEx past $1B in annual recurring revenue. He now runs Skytech.io and writes about AI at stevechazin.com under the banner "AI for the Rest of Us." Tellie is his first shipped Mac app and was built without formal coding training, using AI as a pair programmer. It is named after his granddaughter Ellie, who is just learning to read.
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