Privacy Policy

Draft - written to accurately describe what the app does today. Not reviewed by a lawyer. Treat as informal until legal review, especially once real payments/accounts are involved (see "Coming later" below).

Sonai is a free, hands-free voice translator. There's no sign-up and no account - you can start using it immediately. Here's exactly what happens to your data, in plain language.

The short version

• No accounts, no login, no sign-up needed to use Sonai. We don't collect your name, email, or any personal information just to translate. (If you choose to voluntarily support the project financially, Stripe will ask for a payment email - see "Support Sonai Project" below.)
• Your conversations and audio never touch our servers - there's nothing on our end for them to be stored in. (We do run a small database now, but only for people who choose to financially support the project - see below.)
• We don't store your audio, anywhere, ever. It's used only in the moment to recognize what you said.
• Your conversation history and settings live only in your own browser, on your own device. We never see it, and it's never uploaded anywhere.
• We use Microsoft Clarity to see how people use the app (including session recordings) so we can find and fix rough spots - see "Analytics" below.
• We're exploring an opt-in feature that would use your conversation history to build you a personalized learning course - it isn't built yet, and it will need your explicit consent before it touches any of your data. See "Coming later" below.

In more detail

Translation

When you speak (or type), the recognized text - not audio - is sent from your browser directly to Google's public Translate service to be translated, and the result comes straight back. No account, no API key, no sign-up. This is a live request per message, not something stored anywhere by us.

Speech recognition uses your browser's own built-in voice recognition feature (the standard Web Speech API). For most browsers (e.g. Chrome), this sends your audio to the browser maker's own servers (e.g. Google) to convert it to text - that's a feature of your browser itself, not something Sonai adds, controls, or has access to. Sonai never receives, sees, or stores that audio.

Analytics

We use Microsoft Clarity to understand how people use Sonai - which screens get used, where people get stuck, that kind of thing. Clarity records on-screen interactions (including session replays), which can include what's shown on screen at the time, and sets a cookie to link your visits together. It's Microsoft's tool, running on Microsoft's servers, governed by Microsoft's privacy statement. We don't use any other tracking or advertising.

What's stored, and where

• Conversation history (what was said and its translation, as text): stored only in your browser's local database (IndexedDB), on your device. Never uploaded, never seen by us. Deleting a message, or clearing your browser's site data, removes it for good.
• Settings (language pair, voice choices, mic sensitivity, interface language): stored only in your browser's local storage, on your device.
• Support Sonai Project (optional): if you choose to make a voluntary contribution, Stripe collects your payment email and processes the payment - your card details go directly to Stripe and never reach us. We store the contribution amount, currency, and payment date, plus - only if you opt in - your first name and Instagram username for public recognition. Your email is never shown publicly or shared.

In short: your conversations live only in your browser, never on any server of ours. The one thing we do store server-side is limited to people who choose to voluntarily support the project financially.

Third parties involved

• Google Translate: receives the text you're translating (not audio) for each message - see above.
• Your browser's speech recognition provider (e.g. Google, for Chrome) - see above. This is your browser's own feature, not Sonai's.
• Microsoft Clarity: receives on-screen usage data - see "Analytics" above.
• Stripe: if you choose to support the project financially, processes your payment and collects your payment email and card details - card details never reach us. See Stripe's privacy policy.
• Google Fonts: the app loads its typeface from Google's font service, a standard, widely-used practice that means your browser makes a request to Google when the app loads (the same as almost any website using web fonts).

Outside of Support Sonai Project and analytics as described above, none of these receive any personal information about you - only the text being translated, and only for as long as it takes to translate it.

Coming later: a personalized learning course from your own conversations

We're exploring a feature where, if you choose to turn it on, Sonai would summarize your real conversations (using an AI service called Groq) to build you a personalized language-learning course based on situations you've actually been in, instead of a generic course.

This isn't built yet. When it is: it will be off by default and your conversations stay local-only unless you explicitly opt in; turning it on will require creating a lightweight account, since a course needs to persist across sessions and devices; and your conversation history would be uploaded to our servers and sent to Groq to generate your course content. We'll publish the full specifics - exactly what's stored, for how long, and how to delete your data and account - before this feature goes live, not after.

Questions

This is a small, one-person project. If you have questions about any of this, email [email protected].