Tellie Is a Teleprompter That Follows Your Speech

A teleprompter is meant to solve one problem: keeping your eyes near the camera while you speak. In practice, a fixed scroll can create another. Pause for a thought and the text moves on. Repeat a sentence, skip a paragraph, or answer someone in a meeting, and you may lose your place. The result is a presenter looking at notes rather than at the audience.

Tellie takes a different approach on the Mac. Instead of treating the script as a conveyor belt, it listens to what you say and highlights the words it believes you have spoken. The useful idea is not simply hands-free scrolling. It is allowing the speaker to depart from the script without immediately having to repair the teleprompter.

The problem Tellie is built around

The app is aimed at people who talk while looking at a Mac screen: video creators, actors, teachers, salespeople, speakers, and people presenting in online meetings. The common situation is familiar. You have prepared notes or a script, but reading them exactly is stiff and looking away to find your place breaks eye contact.

Tellie’s proposed answer is to keep the text close to the camera, including in the Mac’s notch where available. You open a document, start the microphone, and speak. According to the developer, the app follows the words you actually say rather than advancing at a preset pace. If you pause or ad-lib, it waits. If you jump forward, it can continue from the new part of the document.

That makes Tellie closer to a speech-following teleprompter than a conventional auto-scrolling one. It does not require the presenter to match the software’s timing. The tradeoff is that the app needs to hear and interpret your speech accurately enough to find its place. A quiet room, a clear microphone, and a script that resembles what you intend to say will matter more here than they would with manual scrolling.

More than highlighting words

The developer’s broader claim is that Tellie tracks what a presentation still needs to cover, not just where the cursor is in the text. You can mark points in a script, and the app is intended to recognise when you have covered them in your own words. It can then indicate what remains, warn that an important point may run out of time, and provide a report on missed material after the take.

That changes the product’s role. A basic teleprompter helps you remember phrasing. Tellie is also presented as a private checklist for a recording, pitch, lesson, or audition. This could be useful when a script contains required ideas but does not need to be delivered word for word. It is less useful if your priority is precise line reading and you do not want speech recognition deciding whether a point counts.

The app also supports a free plan with a paid upgrade. The free version is described as a complete teleprompter with document loading, automatic scrolling, font controls, mirror mode, adjustable opacity, and a way to send selected text from other Mac apps into Tellie. Voice Follow and the more advanced presentation tools are part of the upgrade.

Where it fits in a presentation setup

Tellie is designed to stay out of the audience’s view. The developer says it is invisible to Zoom and screen-recording software, so notes can remain on the presenter’s Mac without appearing in a shared meeting or captured video. That is useful for a speaker who wants a nearby prompt but does not want the audience to see a notes window.

Its Presenter Mode is more specific. It places Keynote speaker notes in the notch and is intended to advance the slide when you finish the relevant line. That could remove the need for a clicker or a second display when giving a prepared Keynote presentation. It does not make Tellie a general-purpose presentation controller. The described slide integration is for Keynote, and the app runs on macOS only.

The developer also says speech recognition happens on the Mac, with no account or sign-in required and no audio sent to a server. That is a meaningful fit for private scripts and internal meetings, although it remains a product claim rather than something this article can independently test.

Who should use it

Tellie makes the most sense for Mac users whose real problem is losing eye contact or losing their place when they depart from notes. It is particularly suited to video recording, auditions, online meetings, sales pitches, and lessons where talking naturally matters more than reciting every line.

It is not a good fit for Windows users, people who need a mobile teleprompter, or presenters who want broad slide-software support. It also adds a microphone and speech-recognition dependency, so anyone uncomfortable with local listening or uncertain word matching may prefer a manual prompt. For those limits, Tellie is a focused tool rather than a complete presentation system. Its value is in making prepared material less brittle when the speaker stops reading exactly as written.