The private teleprompter. Nothing leaves your Mac.

No. Tellie reads your script from the document you opened, displays it on your screen, and that is the end of its journey. Your script never touches the internet.

No. When you click the microphone button, macOS asks for permission the first time. Once you grant it, audio from your mic is passed to Apple's built-in Speech framework, which runs on your Mac. Tellie uses the transcribed words to advance the script and then discards them. Nothing is recorded, saved, or sent anywhere.

On your Mac, locally, using Apple's Speech framework. macOS ships with on-device language models for more than 40 languages and regional variants. Tellie asks the system to transcribe with the on-device flag set, so the audio never leaves the device.

You can verify this yourself: open Tellie, put your Mac in airplane mode, and the voice-follow feature still works perfectly.

No cloud AI, ever. Voice Follow uses Apple's on-device speech recognition. On a Mac with Apple Intelligence turned on, Take Coach can ask Apple's on-device model to word its note more warmly, while Tellie's own rules decide the score. Nothing is sent to any AI service.

No. Tellie never records audio and keeps no transcript. Take Coach keeps findings only: numbers, which points you covered, and the coaching written from them. Nothing is uploaded; each briefing stays on your Mac for 90 days.

No. The app contains no analytics SDKs, no telemetry library, no crash reporter, and no event tracking. We do not know how often you open the app, what scripts you load, or whether anything has ever crashed for you. (If something does crash, please email us and we'll fix it.)

Once a day, Tellie quietly checks a small XML file at tellieapp.com/appcast.xml to see whether a new version is available. This is how the auto-update feature works (it uses the open-source Sparkle framework, the standard for Mac app updates).

The check sends only the request itself. No identifier, no Mac serial number, no account, no script content. It looks identical to your web browser fetching any other public file.

No. Here is the whole list, because “your script stays private” is worth more when you can see what it covers:

Opening a file (.txt, .md, .rtf, .docx, .pdf, .pages) reads it off your disk the way any Mac app does. Pasting with Command-V takes it from your clipboard. Send to Tellie, whether you use the Control-Option-Command-T shortcut or a tellie://send link, hands the text from one app on your Mac to another through macOS itself, the same way opening a PDF in Preview does. Presenter Magic asks Keynote for the current slide's notes, on your Mac, through the same Apple Events any automation uses. The Pulse Log writes to a file in your own Library folder. Companion, when you turn it on, sends your script to your own devices over your own Wi-Fi, never through the internet.

Every one of those is your Mac talking to itself or to your own devices. Tellie's own code makes exactly one outbound request, the license check described below, and it carries a license key and a random ID, nothing else. The daily update check is Sparkle's, and it carries nothing about you.

You do not have to take our word for it. Put your Mac in airplane mode and use Tellie normally. Open a script, paste one in, send one over, talk to it and watch the words highlight. Everything works, because none of it ever needed the internet.

A shared script link is built so that the script never reaches us in the first place. The text rides in the part of the URL after the #, and browsers never put that part on the wire. It goes from your browser to your recipient's browser and is unpacked there.

The practical consequence: a script you share is not ours to store, to lose in a breach, or to be asked for by anyone. There is no database of shared scripts, because there is nowhere for one to live.

Your license key and a random ID, to tellieapp.com/api/license-verify. That is the whole request. It happens when you activate, roughly once a month after that, and when Tellie comes back after a long time offline. Tellie Free never makes this call at all.

The random ID is how your three activations are counted, so you can move Tellie between your own Macs and we can tell one from another. It is a fresh UUID generated on your Mac the first time it is needed and stored in Tellie's own preferences. It is not your Mac's serial number, hardware UUID, or anything Apple issued: we deliberately avoided the hardware identifier, because counting to three does not require knowing which machine you are on. Erase Tellie's preferences and you get a new one.

Nothing about your use of the app goes with it. Not what you opened, not how long you spoke, not whether you used voice follow. The verification result comes back and is cached so Tellie keeps working offline.

No. There is no script library, no recents list synced anywhere, no cloud storage. macOS itself may remember recently opened documents (the same way it does for any app), but that information lives entirely on your Mac in your user account.

Two Pro features keep things on your Mac on purpose: Take Coach keeps its findings (never audio or a transcript) for 90 days, and the Pulse Log keeps a 30-day history of what was sent to the notch. Neither ever leaves your Mac.

On purpose. Tellie marks its window as excluded from screen capture using a documented macOS API. So when you record your screen, screenshot, or share your screen in Zoom or Google Meet, your script does not appear in the recording. This is both a presentation feature (your script stays private during a livestream) and a privacy feature (your script does not end up in someone else's cloud-stored Zoom recording). Want it visible for a demo? One toggle in Settings makes it recordable, for that session only.

The site uses Google Analytics 4 and Vercel Analytics to count visits and downloads. Both are configured with the standard, anonymous setup most websites use. No personal information is collected. Google Analytics may set its standard cookies; you can opt out via your browser settings or any tracking-blocker extension. Separately, on our Pro pages, if you arrive through an affiliate's referral link, Lemon Squeezy's affiliate script sets an anonymous cookie so we can credit that affiliate if you buy Pro. It holds no personal information. None of this touches the app itself, which still sends no telemetry of any kind.

When you click the download button, the site logs the version downloaded, the timestamp, and the channel the link came from (for example, “LinkedIn” or “newsletter”). It does not log your name, your email, your IP address, or any identifier that could trace back to you. The counts are used purely to understand which release channels work and which versions are in the wild.

The app holds nothing to delete: no account, no profile, no synced library, and none of your scripts. To remove it from your Mac, drag Tellie.app to the Trash. macOS Keychain may retain the microphone permission entry, which you can clear in System Settings, Privacy & Security, Microphone.

Buying Tellie Pro creates an order, and an order carries the email address the receipt and the license key were sent to, the same as any purchase anywhere. Want that removed? Email steve@skytech.io and it is gone.

GDPR and CCPA give people rights over data companies hold about them. Using Tellie creates none: no profile, no scripts, no telemetry, nothing tied to you. A purchase creates an order record, held by our payment processor Lemon Squeezy and by us, with the email address the receipt went to and the license key on it. To see it, correct it, or have it deleted, email steve@skytech.io and we'll respond within 30 days.

Tellie is not designed for or marketed to children under 13. It is also not designed to exclude them. Since the app collects no personal information, COPPA concerns don't really apply in the usual sense. That said, the app is named after my granddaughter Ellie, and she thinks the way her name appears in the menu bar is cool.

If anything material changes (for example, if Tellie adds an optional cloud feature), this page will be updated and the change will be announced on the homepage and in the newsletter at stevechazin.com. We will never quietly start collecting data without telling you.

Tellie is built by Steve Chazin, a one-person operation. There is no parent company harvesting your data on the side. The skytech.io domain is also Steve. steve@skytech.io goes directly to a human.