Privacy

The short version

• The screenshot you drag a frame over is recognised on your own computer by the text recognition built into Windows or macOS (on Windows in 50-150 ms). The text is then kept in a local history you can switch off, with a small preview image alongside it; neither is ever uploaded, and by default the image itself is not sent anywhere.
• With the local Piper voice or the built-in voices of Windows or macOS, and no online AI, nothing at all leaves your computer.
• With an online voice, such as Microsoft Edge or Google, the sentence text is sent to that service to be spoken. Not the image, not the file, not your screen: the sentence.
• With an online AI that you connect yourself, an AI action such as Explain or Summarize sends the recognised text to that AI. A picture of your screen only goes along if you switch on Explanations may look at your screen, which is off by default, and ask for an explanation of a step.
• This website stores what a shop needs: your email address, your licence, your invoices. Three functional cookies, an anonymous visitor count without cookies, no advertising, no tracking.

What the app does on your computer

Speakybara takes an image of the region you framed and hands it to the text recognition of Windows or macOS itself to get sentences back. That recognition happens on your own computer. The recognised text is kept in a local history you can switch off, together with a small preview image of the capture; a separate switch turns off just that preview. Neither is ever uploaded, and by default the image itself is not sent anywhere. What can leave your computer is text: the sentence being read, if you have it read aloud by an online voice, and the recognised text, if you use an AI action with an online AI. The one setting that sends a picture of your screen is described under What leaves your computer, and when.

These files live on your own computer and are not sent anywhere: on Windows in the Speakybara folder, on a Mac in the Speakybara folders under Application Support, Caches and Logs in your user Library.

Your settings

Voice, speed, hotkeys and, if you use them, your own API keys for services such as Google, OpenAI or OpenRouter.

The usage counter

Characters per month per voice service, so you can see where you are in a free allowance. 6 months of history are kept.

Cached sentences

Audio from online voices such as Edge and Google, so repeating a sentence starts instantly and costs nothing. It stops by itself at 600 files or 250 MB and drops the oldest.

Your own English words

The list you can add jargon to for the local voice.

An error log

Only written when something actually goes wrong. It stays on your computer.

What leaves your computer, and when

This depends entirely on which voice service you pick in settings, and they behave differently: Piper, the built-in voices of Windows or macOS, Microsoft Edge (Windows only), Google Cloud, and online voices you connect with your own key.

No voice service ever receives the image, because the recognition step happens before any voice is involved. If you want nothing at all to leave, use the local voice: it is free and it is the default answer to that question.

An AI action — Explain with AI, Summarize, Translate, Improve writing, the optional AI clean-up, or an action you wrote yourself — sends the recognised text, and only the text, to the provider you chose yourself: an online service with your own key (OpenAI, Google Gemini or OpenRouter), or a model running on your own computer through LM Studio, Ollama, llama.cpp or Unsloth/vLLM. Your capture is not sent along, and with a local model nothing leaves your computer at all. Speakybara runs no AI service of its own and has no server in that path: the request goes straight from your computer to that provider, and your key stays in config.json on your own disk.

One setting can send a picture: Explanations may look at your screen, under AI for tasks, which is off by default. If you switch it on and ask for an explanation of a step in a step-by-step plan, a picture of your screen goes to that same AI, so it can tell you where a button is; Speakybara's own windows are left out of it. With a local model the picture stays on your computer too. It is the only part of the app that sends an image.

What the Speakybara Complete service receives

Speakybara Complete exists so you do not need a Google Cloud project. That means the sentence passes through our server on its way to Google, and it is fair that you know exactly what that server does with it.

• It checks your licence key and the device id, so it knows the request is yours and which of your 3 devices it came from.
• It counts the characters in the sentence and adds them to your month, because the fair-use allowance is 400,000 characters a month.
• It passes the sentence to Google Text-to-Speech and streams the audio back to your computer.
• It keeps the audio for a sentence for up to 30 days, so hearing the same sentence again costs no characters and no second request to Google.
• It does not log the sentence text. Per request we store the licence, the device id, the number of characters, whether the cache was hit, and how long it took.

What this website stores

Your account

Your email address and the name you give. If you set a password, we only store a scrambled form of it (a hash) that cannot be turned back into the password. You can also sign in with a link we email you.

Product news

Only if you tick the box when you make an account or order. At most one email a month, about new voices and releases. You can turn it off at any time in your account.

Your licence

The key, when it runs out, and which devices are activated on it. A device is stored as a name and an id, so you can recognise which computer to deactivate.

Your invoices

Amount, VAT, date and billing details. Payments are handled by Stripe; your card details never reach our server.

Support messages and feedback

A support message holds your name, email address, subject and message, plus your licence key and app version if you add them. Feedback on the test version holds what you write, your system and app version, and your email address only if you give one. Both are stored in this site's database and emailed to us. Kept for 24 months and then deleted.

Usage totals

Characters per month per licence, for the fair-use check and the meter in your account. Kept for 24 months.

Where it is kept

In a database at Neon, in Frankfurt (EU). Neon only stores it for us, as a processor.

Visits are counted with Vercel Web Analytics, from Vercel, the company that hosts this site. It records which page was opened, the site you came from, roughly where you are (country and city) and your type of device, operating system and browser. It sets no cookies and builds no profile: a visitor is told apart by a code calculated from the request, which Vercel discards after 24 hours. Email addresses, sign-in links and order numbers are stripped from the web address before a visit is counted.

No advertising, no tracking pixels and no social buttons. The fonts are served from this site rather than from Google's font servers, and so is the counting script, so opening a page makes no request to a third party.

Who processes data for us

A few companies do part of the work for this website. They are processors: they may only use the data to do that job for us, not for anything of their own.

Vercel, Resend, Stripe and GitHub (part of Microsoft) are American companies, so part of this data can be processed in the United States. That transfer is covered by the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework or by the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, as set out in each company's data processing agreement. The database itself stays in Frankfurt.

Cookies

Three, all functional: one that keeps you signed in, one that remembers your language, and one that lets the header say Account instead of Sign in. None of them follows you anywhere. The cookie page lists them one by one with their lifetimes.

How long we keep things

Account

As long as you have an account. Delete it and your password and sign-in sessions go with it.

Licences and orders

Deleting your account cancels a licence. The licence and its orders are then kept for the bookkeeping, as long as invoices (7 years).

Invoices

7 years. Dutch tax law requires it, so invoices, and the licence and orders they belong to, are what we cannot delete on request.

Support messages and feedback

24 months, then they are deleted.

Usage totals

24 months.

Visitor count

Only anonymous totals. The code that tells visitors apart is discarded after 24 hours.

Server logs

At most 30 days, at Vercel, which keeps them only briefly.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, have it corrected, have it deleted, object to how we use it, or take it elsewhere. Write to privacy@speakybara.app and we answer within one month.

You can also complain to the Dutch data protection authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens. We would rather you told us first, but it is your right either way.

The legal grounds, briefly: your account, licence and the Speakybara Complete service are what we need to provide what you signed up for or bought; invoices are a legal obligation; support messages and feedback are your consent, given when you send them; product news is your consent too, which you can withdraw at any time; the anonymous visitor count is our legitimate interest in knowing which pages get read.

Who to write to

Responsible for your data: Speakybara, in the Netherlands.

Privacy questions go to privacy@speakybara.app, everything else to support@speakybara.app. We do not have a data protection officer; the company is small enough that you reach the person who decides.

If this notice changes in a way that matters, we say so on this page and, for account holders, by email. The date at the top is the date of the last change.