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, Rich Text, Word, and PDF 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
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.
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), and PDF (.pdf). 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.
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 (a Tellie Pro feature) 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 via macOS's built-in document reader. Plain text content comes through cleanly; if your Word doc has section headings you want Tab and 1-9 navigation on, add a # or ## markdown marker before each heading inside Word.
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.
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 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 highlight lands on 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 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. 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.
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. 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, 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. 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. 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, and 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.
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 Mode, 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 everything that was sent to Tellie, 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.
Find it in Tellie's menu-bar menu under Pulse Log (it appears once you've used the Pulse surface). 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.
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