Legal
Privacy Policy
ALOUD (“we”) is a real-time voice-translation app. This policy describes what we collect, why, and how to delete it.
What we collect
- Account. You sign in with Apple. We receive your Apple account identifier and an email address — yours, or Apple's private-relay address if you choose “Hide My Email”.
- Transcripts. The text of your translated conversations, plus session metadata (language pair, timestamps, cost), is saved to your account so the in-app History — search, export, resume — works.
- Usage and billing records. We meter each session's usage to charge your prepaid credit balance, and keep a ledger of credit grants, purchases, refunds, and credit expiry dates and adjustments. Payment itself is processed by Apple; we never see your payment details.
What we do not collect
- We do not store your audio. Speech is streamed for live translation and spoken back; ALOUD keeps no recording.
- Photo files stay on your iPhone, not on ALOUD's servers. They are also sent to OpenAI for processing as described below.
- No ads, no third-party analytics, no cross-app tracking — and we never sell your data.
How translation works
Audio streams from your device over an encrypted WebRTC connection to OpenAI's realtime API, which performs translation and assistant responses. On some networks the encrypted stream passes through relay servers operated by Cloudflare, which cannot read its contents. Text features, including back-translation, meaning checks, language detection and assistant web search, send relevant conversation text to OpenAI, including through our servers. If you use the in-app camera, the photo is sent to OpenAI so the assistant can explain it and help translate text in it. Retained photos from the conversation may be sent to OpenAI again when needed for follow-up questions. Photo files go over the encrypted realtime connection; ALOUD does not store them on its servers.
OpenAI processes all of this data as our service provider under its API data-usage policies: API data is not used to train OpenAI's models and may be retained briefly for abuse monitoring. We share this data to provide the translation and assistant features you use, and our agreements with these providers require them to protect it to a standard equal to the one described in this policy.
ALOUD asks for your explicit permission before sending anything to OpenAI. The disclosure appears in the app the first time you sign in, and you can re-read it at any time under Settings → Privacy → How ALOUD uses your data.
Photos and vocabulary on your iPhone
Photos accepted into a conversation are saved on this iPhone so you can reopen, zoom and share them. Saved photos are protected by iOS data protection and excluded from device backups. They are not synchronized to another device. Deleting a conversation, signing out, deleting your account or deleting the app removes the associated local photos. Photos may be unavailable in History on another device or after reinstalling. The assistant's descriptions and answers can be saved as part of the conversation transcript.
When you share a photo, the receiving app or service handles that shared copy under its own policies. Deleting the copy in ALOUD does not delete copies you have shared elsewhere.
Names and common words you enter in Settings are stored locally and may be included in the context sent to OpenAI to help recognize and translate your speech. ALOUD does not read your address book for this feature.
Where your data lives
Our backend runs on Supabase, hosted on AWS in the US East region. Access is scoped per account, and long-lived provider keys stay on our servers — they never reach your device.
Retention and deletion
Account data — transcripts, ledger, usage — is kept until you delete your account, which you can do in the app at any time (Settings → Delete Account). Deletion removes your sign-in and your server-side data, including all transcripts. Two narrow exceptions: we may keep limited internal fraud-prevention and administrative audit records, which never contain conversation content, and records Apple keeps about your purchases are governed by Apple's own policies. You can also export your transcripts from History at any time before deleting. Local photo deletion is described above.
Children
ALOUD is not directed at children under 13.
Changes
If our practices change, we'll update this page and its effective date.