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, and refunds. 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.
- 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 the translation. On some networks the encrypted stream passes through relay servers operated by Cloudflare, which cannot read its contents. Text features — back-translation verify, language detection, typed input and assistant web search — send conversation text to OpenAI models via our servers. If you use the in-app camera, the photo you take is sent to OpenAI as well, so the app can describe and translate what is in the picture; photos are used for that response only and are not retained by ALOUD.
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 only to provide the translation you asked for, 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.
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.
Children
ALOUD is not directed at children under 13.
Changes
If our practices change, we'll update this page and its effective date.