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.
Use the file picker to open a script. Plain text, Markdown, and Rich Text all work.
Grant mic access the first time. After that, the button toggles voice-follow on and off.
Look at your camera. Read at your own pace. Tellie listens and scrolls the script to match your voice, word by word.
Getting started
Download the DMG from tellie.skytech.io. 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.
Tellie runs on macOS 14 or later, on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. On-device speech recognition is faster and lower-latency on Apple Silicon, but it works on both.
In the menu bar, near the notch on MacBooks that have one. When you open a script, the prompter window expands below the notch. You can resize it by grabbing the edges.
Using Tellie
Plain text (.txt), Markdown (.md), and Rich Text (.rtf). Open them from the file picker. Tellie strips formatting and presents the text in a single, scrollable column sized for reading from a few feet away.
If you have a script in Word or PDF, export or copy it to one of the supported formats first. Most word processors export to RTF or plain text in a few clicks.
Tellie matches the words you say to the words on screen. If you improvise a section, skip a sentence, or substitute a synonym, Tellie tries to find your place again from the next phrase you say. You'll notice a brief pause while it catches up, then it resumes.
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 underline sits under the first word of the sentence you want to read next. Then keep going.
Yes. Open Settings and drag the opacity slider. You can take it down to 60% so it floats subtly over your camera preview, or keep it at 100% for full readability.
Yes. Settings includes a font size control. You can also resize the prompter window itself by dragging the edges, and the text reflows.
Yes. Open Settings and pick any language Apple supports for on-device speech recognition. The list includes about 50 languages. The recognizer runs locally on your Mac in whichever language you pick.
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 by design, so you can read from a prompter on a livestream without your viewers seeing the script.
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.
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.
From the menu bar icon, choose Reset Window Size. Or drag the edges of the prompter window to resize it manually.
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 for early adopters, forever. 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.
Email steve@skytech.io. Steve reads and answers every message himself, usually within a day.
Email Steve