YellowLight Support

Think of a traffic light. Amber means you’re past your yellow level (170 wpm to begin with): the Top-of-screen light and YellowLight’s symbol and number in the menu bar turn amber, without a sound, so you can ease off. Red means you’re past your red level (180 wpm): you hear a soft ding, the light turns red and the Screen-edge glow lights the edges of your screen red. That’s where the name comes from. Your target (150 wpm) never shows a light or makes a sound: it’s the pace to aim for.

In Settings > Alerts, Early warning (no sound) chooses where amber shows: Top-of-screen light, Screen-edge glow (one soft amber glow when the warning starts), Both or Off. Unless it’s off, the symbol and the number in the menu bar turn amber too.

YellowLight’s symbol is voice bars with a fermata (the music pause mark). While it listens, your live words per minute appear next to it, and the symbol and the number are plain while your pace is fine, amber past your yellow level and red past your red level. A dash (–) means it doesn’t have enough of your speech yet. The symbol on its own, without a number, means it isn’t listening: it may be waiting for a call, paused for this call, or need microphone access. Click it for the menu; its first line says which.

It watches for a call app that is using your microphone and playing sound at the same time, as a real call does. Microphone use alone, such as a preview before you join a meeting, doesn’t count. Listening starts about 2 seconds after the call starts and stops a few seconds after it ends.

Which apps count is up to you: Settings > Calls lists Microsoft Teams, Webex, Zoom, Slack huddles, FaceTime and phone calls (all on to begin with) and web browsers (off to begin with). Recording and dictation apps also use the microphone, but they never start YellowLight listening.

Not through YellowLight: it never sends anything into the call, and with headphones only you hear the ding. It plays where your call’s sound plays, and the light and the glow appear only on your screen. If your call plays through your Mac’s speakers, the ding plays there too, so people near you, and possibly your microphone, can hear it. Headphones are best.

YellowLight won’t play the ding on a speaker your microphone could easily pick up, such as an AirPlay speaker or a TV, unless you choose that speaker under Play on in Settings > Alerts. If there’s nowhere suitable to play it, it skips the sound and still shows the light and the glow.

Yes. YellowLight listens to your microphone directly, so muting yourself in Teams or Zoom doesn’t mute it. If you’re talking to someone in the room, choose Pause for This Call. The pause ends when the call ends, or after 90 minutes at most.

Possibly. YellowLight asks macOS to keep its light and glow out of screen sharing, but recent versions of macOS don’t always respect that. If you share your whole screen, others might see them. For an important presentation, share a single window instead, or in Settings > Alerts turn off Top-of-screen light and Screen-edge glow and set Early warning (no sound) to Off.

On test recordings with a known pace, YellowLight’s readings averaged within about 4% of the true rate, usually a little slow. It counts the way speaking rates are usually quoted: short pauses of up to 2 seconds (breaths, thinking) count as speaking time, and longer silences, such as while someone else talks, are left out. Numbers count as the words you say, so “$250,000” is five words.

Any single reading moves around more. Over the default 10 seconds, the number for steady speech wandered by about 8 to 12 wpm, and on the hardest recordings (long pauses, or taking turns with someone else) it ended up as much as 7% off. For a steadier number that reacts more slowly, choose 20 seconds under Measure over the last in Settings > Pace: on the same recordings it ended within 4% every time.

A number appears once YellowLight has at least 8 seconds and 15 words of your speech to go on. Until then the menu bar shows a dash (–).

On purpose, so it doesn’t nag. Your pace has to stay over your red level for 2 seconds while you’re talking, and what you’re saying right now has to be too fast as well. After a pause, it needs about 4 seconds of your new answer before it can ding. After a ding, it waits at least 5 seconds before the next one, so if you stay too fast you hear a ding every 5 seconds. In Settings > Pace you can change that wait (Wait at least, 5 seconds to 2 minutes) and how much of your speech it measures over (Measure over the last, 5 to 60 seconds; 10 is the default, and 5 is very jumpy).

Yes. In Settings > Calls, under Calls in, turn on Web browsers (Google Meet and others). That covers Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, Brave and Arc. YellowLight can’t tell one website from another, so with this on it also listens when a browser uses your microphone and plays sound for anything else.

The ones your call uses: wired headphones, USB headsets, AirPods and other Bluetooth headphones, and audio interfaces. YellowLight follows your call’s microphone and headphones automatically, or you can choose them under Microphone (Settings > Calls) and Play on (Settings > Alerts).

On an audio interface with several inputs, such as a Focusrite Scarlett, leave Channel (Settings > Calls) on Automatic or pick input 1 or 2. On many interfaces, channels 3 and up carry the computer’s own sound, including the other people on the call.

English only. YellowLight works only when you speak English on your calls. It doesn’t support other languages: it has been tested only in English, its word counting (for example, how numbers are counted) is built for English, and its starting levels come from research on English speech.

Language in Settings > Calls lists every language Apple’s speech recognizer offers on your Mac, but another choice may give wrong readings. Leave it on English (US), the default. It was tested with American and British voices.

No to both. Your speech is processed on your Mac by Apple’s on-device speech recognition, and YellowLight never saves audio or words. It has no permission to use the network, so it can’t send anything anywhere. The privacy policy has the details.

No. YellowLight needs a Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 26 or later.

It’s a small symbol, voice bars with a fermata (the music pause mark), near the right end of the menu bar, among your other menu bar icons. If it isn’t there, check that YellowLight is running: open it from your Applications folder. In System Settings > Menu Bar, make sure YellowLight is allowed. If your menu bar is full (especially on a MacBook with a camera notch), macOS hides icons that don’t fit, so quitting a few other menu bar apps can make room.

Open at login is off unless you turn it on. Open YellowLight’s Settings, click General and turn on Open at login. If Settings then shows “Allow YellowLight in Login Items”, click Open Login Items… and turn YellowLight on there.

Choose Open Privacy Settings… in YellowLight’s menu and turn YellowLight on under Microphone (System Settings > Privacy & Security > Microphone).

In Settings > Calls, check that Listen is set to “Automatically during calls” and that your call app is ticked (for browser calls, turn on web browsers). Listening starts about 2 seconds after the call app starts using the microphone and playing the call. Start Listening Now always works.

YellowLight needs about 8 seconds of your speech before it shows a number. If it never shows one, check Microphone and Channel in Settings > Calls: on an audio interface, your microphone is usually on input 1 or 2.

Choose Test Ding and Glow. During a call it plays where the call’s sound goes; outside a call it uses your microphone’s device, so if your call uses different headphones, try it during a call. Check Play on and Volume in Settings > Alerts. If your headphones are plugged into a different device than the one the call uses, pick them under Play on.

The first time, macOS may be downloading Apple’s English speech model. Make sure your Mac is online and give it a few minutes. If the menu shows “Speech model problem”, YellowLight keeps retrying by itself, and right away when a call starts.

Apple’s speech recognizer stopped during a call. YellowLight restarts it by itself within a few seconds.

Some call apps keep using the microphone between calls. YellowLight ignores an app that uses the microphone without playing any sound, but if it still happens, untick that app under Calls in in Settings > Calls, or quit the app between calls.

The pause carried over, for example because you joined the next meeting straight from the paused one. Choose Resume. A pause never lasts more than 90 minutes.

Your microphone signal may be very quiet. Turn up the input gain on your microphone or audio interface, and check Channel in Settings > Calls. YellowLight counts only your own voice: it learns how loud you are and ignores words much quieter than that, such as other people’s voices leaking from your headphones into your microphone. If your microphone is so quiet that it can’t hear you clearly, the menu says “waiting for your voice” and nothing is counted until you turn the gain up (in a noisy room, a headset or a closer microphone helps). If it learned your voice earlier and you then turned the gain down or switched microphones, the menu says “your voice sounds quieter than usual”: turn the gain back up, or click Forget next to Voice level in Settings > Calls so it learns your voice again.