Tellie

Tellie is your silent second screen for Mac. It lives in the space around the MacBook notch and holds what you need while you look at the camera, the room, or your audience. It began as a teleprompter that listens, using Apple's on-device Speech framework to match the words you actually say to the words on your script and scroll to keep up, in about 50 languages, with no audio ever leaving your Mac. Speed up, slow down, ad-lib, or skip a line; the script follows you.

That teleprompter is still what working actors and creators reach for, but it turned out to be one shape of a bigger idea. In Presenter Mode, Tellie shows your Keynote speaker notes in the notch and advances your slides when you finish a thought, so the next slide is already there before you reach for the clicker. For developers, any app, terminal, or AI agent can push a line to the notch through the tellie:// scheme or the @tellie/mcp and @tellie/cli packages on npm, so a build result, a test outcome, or an agent's question appears the instant it matters.

Tellie stays invisible to Zoom, screen recorders, and screen sharing, so whatever it holds stays yours, and everything runs on-device with no account and no telemetry. It opens text, Markdown, RTF, Word, Pages, and PDF, ships serif, sans-serif, and OpenDyslexic fonts, and remembers font size, speed, and position per file. The notarized DMG is about 2.4 MB.

Tellie was created by Steve Chazin, a former Apple exec rehired personally by Steve Jobs in 1997 and later a leader at Cisco and Salesforce, who built the first version in three days, about 4,000 lines of Swift, entirely by talking to an AI agent, despite never writing production code. He built it during a visit to his granddaughter in Vermont, working while she napped or was at school, and named the app after her. Her name is Ellie, and she is just learning to read.

More than 300 people are already using Tellie during a quiet soft launch, including working film and TV actors. Tellie is part of Chazin's "AI for the Rest of Us" project at stevechazin.com. Free to download. macOS 14 or later. Available at tellieapp.com.