Privacy

The short version

The screenshot you drag a frame over is recognised on your own PC by the text recognition built into 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 the image itself is never sent anywhere.
With the local Piper voice, nothing at all leaves your computer.
With a Microsoft Edge or Google voice, the sentence text is sent to Microsoft or Google to be spoken. Not the image, not the file, not your screen: the sentence.
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 PC

Speakybara takes an image of the region you framed and hands it to Windows' own text recognition to get sentences back. That recognition happens on your own PC. 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 the image itself is never sent anywhere — the only thing that can leave your PC is the sentence text, and only if you have it read aloud by a Microsoft or Google voice.

These files live in the Speakybara folder on your own PC and are not sent anywhere:

Your settings: Voice, speed, hotkeys and, if you use them, your own Google and OpenAI API keys.
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 Edge and Google voices, 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 PC.

About your local history

Recognised on your own PC and kept in a local history you can switch off; that file never leaves your machine, and only the sentence being read goes out — to Microsoft or Google — if you pick one of their voices.

What leaves your PC, and when

This depends entirely on which voice service you pick in settings. There are four, and they behave differently: Piper, Windows, Microsoft Edge and Google Cloud.

What each voice service receives
Voice service	What is sent	Who receives it
Local (Piper)	Nothing. The voice runs on your CPU.	Nobody
Windows (built-in voices)	Nothing. The voice runs through Windows' own text-to-speech.	Nobody
Microsoft Edge voices	The sentence text to be spoken.	Microsoft
Google Cloud, your own key	The sentence text and your API key.	Google
Speakybara Managed	The sentence text, your licence key and a device id.	Us, and then Google

The image never leaves your PC in any of these modes, 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: OpenAI with your own key, or a model running on your own PC through LM Studio, Ollama, llama.cpp or Unsloth/vLLM. The screenshot is never sent, and with a local model nothing leaves your PC at all. Speakybara runs no AI service of its own and has no server in that path: the request goes straight from your PC to that provider, and your key stays in config.json on your own disk.

What the Managed service receives

Speakybara Managed 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 PC.
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.

Google is a processor here

Google Cloud Text-to-Speech does the speaking. Their terms and their data handling apply to that step, whether you reach them through Managed or with your own key.

What this website stores

Your account: Your email address, and your name if you give one. There is no password: you sign in with a link we email you.
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 PC to deactivate.
Your invoices: Amount, VAT, date and billing details. Payments are handled by our payment provider [placeholder]; your card details never reach our server.
Support messages and feedback: What you write to us and, if you give one, the address to answer it. Support messages and feedback on the test version are stored in this site's database and emailed to us. Kept for [placeholder] months and then deleted.
Usage totals: Characters per month per licence, for the fair-use check and the meter in your account. Kept for [placeholder] 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.

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 and licence: As long as you have an account. Delete the account and they go with it.
Invoices: 7 years. Dutch tax law requires it, so this is the one thing we cannot delete on request.
Support messages and feedback: [placeholder] months.
Usage totals: [placeholder] months, then only the monthly total remains.
Visitor count: Only anonymous totals. The code that tells visitors apart is discarded after 24 hours.
Server logs: [placeholder] days.

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 Managed service are what we need to perform the contract you bought; invoices are a legal obligation; support messages and feedback are your consent, given when you send them; the anonymous visitor count is our legitimate interest in knowing which pages get read.

Who to write to

Speakybara [placeholder], Placeholder street 1, 1234 AB Amsterdam, The Netherlands [placeholder]. 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.