Who we are
Palkie Talkie ("we," "us," "our") is a voice language-learning app, operated from San Francisco, CA. This policy covers data collected through the Palkie Talkie iOS app and the palkietalkie.com website. For any privacy or data-rights request, contact us (see Contact below).
What we collect
The minimum required to run the product:
- Account info: your email address and, optionally, the name you'd like the coach to call you.
- Voice recordings: the audio you speak during conversations, streamed to our AI voice provider for real-time processing and saved under your account so the coach can remember you across sessions. You can delete it any time from More → Privacy & Data in the app.
- Conversation transcripts: text of what you said and what the AI replied, stored under your account so future sessions feel personal.
- Profile preferences: native languages, the language you're learning, target accents, proficiency level, coach speaking speed, and goals.
- Knowledge graph: people, places, projects, and interests we extracted from your conversations (so the AI can refer back to them).
- Location: city-level only, used to set the AI's sense of place and time. We do not store your precise GPS coordinates.
- Purchase state: whether you are on the Free or Individual plan, and when your subscription renews. Card numbers and payment instruments are handled exclusively by Apple StoreKit and Stripe; we never see them.
- Usage events: cold-start timings, conversation counts, and performance metrics. Used to find bugs and measure performance.
- Diagnostics: anonymous crash reports.
Calendar data (Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar)
If you connect a calendar in More → Integrations, Palkie Talkie reads the title, start and end time and location of your events for the day when you start a conversation, so the coach can ask about what is on your day. The events become part of that conversation's instructions to our AI voice provider and are kept with that conversation. We never add, change or delete anything in your calendar.
How it is protected: the events, and the access token that lets us read a Google or Outlook calendar, travel only over encrypted connections (TLS), are stored in a database encrypted at rest, and are read only by our own backend to run your conversations. Switching a calendar off in More → Integrations stops all reading of it at once. What differs between the three:
- Google Calendar: read by our backend with read-only access (the
calendar.events.readonly scope). You can also revoke our access at any time at myaccount.google.com/connections. - Outlook: read by our backend from your default calendar through Microsoft Graph, with read-only access (the
Calendars.ReadBasic permission, which withholds each event's body and attachments). We read nothing else in your Microsoft account, including your mail. You can also revoke our access at account.live.com/consent/Manage for a personal Microsoft account, or at myapps.microsoft.com for a work or school account. - Apple Calendar: read on your iPhone, once you allow calendar access, and sent to our backend. You can also withdraw calendar access at any time in your iPhone's Settings → Privacy & Security → Calendars.
Palkie Talkie's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Data from Google Calendar is never used to create, train or improve generalized AI or machine-learning models, ours or anyone else's, is never sold, and is never used for advertising.
How we use it
- To run the app: the AI cannot have a real conversation with you without storing what you said before.
- To personalize: callbacks to past conversations, knowledge-graph entities, your proficiency level.
- To improve the product (if you opted in on the consent screen): we use conversation content to tune prompts, fix bugs, and train future versions of our models. Google Calendar data is never part of it: today's events only set up the conversation they are read for and are left out of anything we keep for training. You can revoke this in More → Privacy & Data at any time.
- To bill you: only the subscription-state fields above. We do not use any other category for billing.
What we do not do
- We do not run ads or share your data with advertising networks.
- We do not track you across apps and websites owned by other companies.
Who we share it with
We use the following third-party providers to run the service:
- OpenAI: real-time AI voice processing. Receives the audio you speak, to generate the coach's spoken replies.
- Clerk: authentication and identity.
- Neon: database for your account, profile, and transcripts.
- Pinecone: semantic recall of past conversations.
- Neo4j: knowledge-graph storage.
- Stripe: web subscription processing.
- Apple: in-app purchases and App Store delivery.
- Fly.io: backend hosting.
- Google AI Studio: post-session analysis (mistake and phrase detection).
- Open-Meteo: weather by approximate location.
We share only the data each provider needs to perform its function. Each provider is bound by contract to protect your data with safeguards equivalent to those in this policy and may not use it for their own purposes.
How long we keep it
Your audio, transcripts, and profile stay under your account for as long as you use Palkie Talkie, so the coach keeps knowing you. You're always in control: delete any of it any time from More → Privacy & Data. Deleting your account (More → Privacy & Data → Delete my account) deactivates it and stops us using your data to provide the service; we retain a minimal record for security and accounting. Backups are retained for 30 days for disaster recovery.
Your rights
- Export: email us and we will send a copy of your data (profile, knowledge graph, transcripts, likes, and any custom personas).
- Delete: in the app, More → Privacy & Data → Delete my account. This removes your account and signs you out.
- Opt out of training: toggle off "Product improvement" in More → Privacy & Data. Personalization stays on; we stop using new conversations to improve our models.
- Opt out of personalization: toggle off "Personalization (memory)" in the same screen. Every conversation will start cold without callbacks.
Kids
The app is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13. If you believe we have, email us at hello@palkietalkie.com and we will delete the account.
Changes
We may update this policy from time to time. The "Last updated" date above reflects the current version, so please review it periodically.
Contact
Email hello@palkietalkie.com for any privacy question or data-rights request. We respond within 7 business days.