Legal

Privacy Policy

Effective 21 September 2026 · Applies to the Emma — Voice Keyboard app

Emma turns your voice into text. This page explains, in plain language, what that requires us to collect, why, and what we deliberately don't do with it.

01Who this covers

Emma — Voice Keyboard ("Emma," "we," "us") is developed and operated by Ruan Botha, currently distributed through a personal Apple Developer account while a dedicated company entity is being set up. This policy covers the Emma app, its keyboard extension, and the cloud service it talks to.

02What we collect

Your dictated audio. Recorded on your device only while you're actively dictating, and sent securely to our transcription server to produce text.
The resulting text. Both the raw transcript and the "polished" version Emma's rewrite pass produces.
A per-install device identifier. A random ID generated once when you install Emma, used only to keep one device's diagnostic logs separate from another's. It isn't tied to your name, Apple ID, or any other personal identifier.
Diagnostic logs, if you choose to export them. Emma's Settings screen has an "Export logs" option for troubleshooting — this only leaves your device if you actively share it with us.
Subscription status. Whether you're subscribed to Emma Premium, and which plan — provided to us by Apple through StoreKit. We never see or store your card details; Apple handles that entirely.
Your AI polish permission. Whether you've agreed to the AI polish screen described in section 5. It is stored on your device only.

03How we use it

To transcribe what you said and type it into whatever app you're using.
To apply Emma's polish pass — cleaning up filler words, punctuation, and phrasing — before it reaches the keyboard.
To diagnose bugs, using only what you explicitly export and send us.

Quality improvement. We may temporarily retain dictated text samples — not audio — on our own servers to evaluate and improve transcription and polish accuracy, particularly for languages like Afrikaans that get less attention from larger providers. This text is not linked to your Apple ID, name, or any account identifier, and never leaves our own infrastructure for this purpose.

04What we don't do

We don't run advertising, and we don't have an ads SDK in the app.
We don't sell your data to anyone, for any reason.
We don't use third-party analytics or tracking SDKs to build a profile of you.
We don't read or retain what you type manually outside of dictation — Emma only processes speech you actively record.

05Third parties involved

Producing a good transcript and a well-written result involves a short chain of processing. Before your first dictation, Emma's AI polish screen shows you this chain and asks for your permission.

Step	Who handles it	What they receive
Speech-to-text	Emma's own transcription server, operated by us, running an openly licensed speech model.	Your voice recording.
Polish / rewrite (AI)	OpenRouter, an AI gateway, which passes the request to an AI language model provider chosen automatically for reliability and quality at the moment of your request.	The text of what you said. Not your audio, name, Apple ID, or contact details.
Payment & subscription	Apple, via the App Store and StoreKit.	We never receive your payment information directly.

Every polish request tells OpenRouter to use only providers that do not store the text and do not use it to train AI models (zero data retention). OpenRouter's own handling of the request is described in its privacy policy.

Your permission. Emma asks for it before your first dictation, and nothing is sent until you agree. You can withdraw it at any time in Emma → Settings → AI polish; dictation then stops working until you agree again.

06How long we keep it

Audio is processed to produce a transcript and is not kept beyond what's needed to do that.
Your dictation history (the "History" feature) is stored only on your own device. We never receive it, and you can clear it at any time from Emma's Settings.
Text retained for quality improvement (section 3) is kept only as long as it's useful for that purpose, and is deleted on request — see Your Rights below.
Exported diagnostic logs are kept only as long as needed to resolve the issue you reported them for.

07Children

Emma is built to be easy for anyone to use, from teenagers to grandparents — but it isn't marketed to, or knowingly used to collect data from, children under 13. If you believe a child has used Emma to dictate, contact us and we'll delete what was collected.

08Your rights

Wherever you are, you can ask us to tell you what we hold about you, correct it, or delete it. If you're in South Africa, this is your right under POPIA; if you're in the EU or UK, under the GDPR. Email us (below) and we'll respond within 30 days.

09Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that meaningfully affects what we collect or how we use it, we'll update the effective date above and, where required, notify you in the app.

10Contact

Questions, data requests, or anything else: ruan.botha.live@gmail.com.