Policy
Privacy policy
Talki is designed so that your recordings and notes stay on your Mac. This policy explains every case where data leaves it, who receives it, and what you can do about it.
Summary
| Data | Where it lives | Who can access it |
|---|---|---|
| Recordings, transcripts, notes, projects, dictionary | Talki's library on your Mac | You. We cannot. |
| Audio sent for transcription | Apple on-device; or OpenRouter and the model you choose | Depends on the provider you pick |
| Your OpenRouter key | macOS Keychain on your Mac | You and the apps you allow |
| Synced text (optional, when available) | Your private iCloud database | You, through your Apple Account |
| Account: identifier, email, sign-in identities | Our account service | Us, to sign you in and keep your plan |
| Subscription records | Apple, and our purchase verification service | Us, to grant Talki Plus |
| Usage analytics (optional, off by default) | Our analytics service | Us, as counts without content |
| Support emails | Our mailbox on Cloudflare | Us; an AI support assistant drafts and checks answers |
Who we are
Talki and the website talki.im are provided by Siarhei Sheleh, Poland ("we", "us"). We are the controller for the personal data described here. Contact: support@talki.im.
Data on your Mac
Talki stores original recordings, transcripts, edited text, notes, projects, your personal dictionary and settings in its library on your Mac. The App Store edition and the direct edition each keep a separate library. We do not receive this data and have no way to read it. You can export notes as Markdown, move them to Trash, restore them, or delete them permanently.
The library is not encrypted by Talki itself; it is protected by your Mac's user account and any disk encryption you use, such as FileVault.
Speech recognition and cleanup
You choose how each recording is transcribed.
- Apple on-device. Talki asks macOS for on-device recognition only. If your language cannot be recognised on-device, Talki tells you and does not upload the audio. Apple's own terms govern the speech framework.
- OpenRouter with your own key. Talki sends the selected recording directly from your Mac to OpenRouter, which forwards it to the provider of the model you chose. If you enable cleanup, the transcript is sent to the text model you chose. OpenRouter's privacy policy and the provider's terms apply. In the App Store edition this happens only after you allow cloud processing, and you can withdraw that permission at any time.
- Talki Plus managed models (when available). Requests go through Talki's service to OpenRouter on your behalf. Our service passes the audio or text to the model and returns the result. It does not keep the content of recordings or transcripts after the request is complete. It keeps usage records, such as time, duration, model and cost, to enforce your allowance and prevent abuse.
We never use your recordings or text to train models.
iCloud text sync (when available)
If you turn on sync, Talki stores notes, projects and your dictionary in your private iCloud database through Apple's CloudKit. We cannot read your private database. Original recordings, local file paths, provider keys and observations from other apps are excluded. Turning sync off stops new transfers and keeps your local library.
Subscriptions
Talki Plus is sold through the App Store. Apple processes the payment; we never receive your card or bank details. To grant and verify access, we receive signed transaction information from Apple and from the app, including the product, purchase and expiry dates, transaction identifiers, the App Store environment and storefront, and refund or revocation events. Our purchase verification service stores these records to decide whether Talki Plus is active and to keep accurate financial records.
Your Talki account
Talki uses an account so your plan follows you to other Macs. You sign in with Apple, Google or a one-time code sent to your email. Our account service stores:
- an account identifier and the email address you share (with Sign in with Apple this can be Apple's private relay address);
- the identifier Apple or Google gives us for your sign-in, never your password;
- hashed session tokens, valid for up to 180 days and revocable; the app keeps its token in the macOS Keychain;
- for email sign-in, a hashed one-time code that expires after 10 minutes. The code is delivered through Cloudflare's email service.
Your account identifier is attached to App Store purchases so a subscription can be restored to the right account. Signing in, signing out or deleting the account never uploads or deletes the notes and recordings on your Mac.
You can delete your account in Talki. Deletion removes the account, its sign-in identities, sessions and codes from our service. Subscription and transaction records are kept as financial records, as described below.
Usage analytics
Usage analytics is off by default. If you turn it on in Settings, Talki sends counts of events such as "recording saved" or "transcription failed", together with a random identifier created when you opt in, the app version and the macOS version. Events never include audio, transcripts, note text, file names, project names, receipts or API keys. Turning analytics off deletes the identifier and clears events that have not been sent. Events are received by our own analytics service, built on the open-source Aptabase software.
If you choose to share analytics with app developers in macOS settings, Apple may provide us with crash reports and aggregated usage under Apple's terms.
This website
talki.im sets no cookies and runs no analytics or advertising scripts. It does not request microphone access or accept uploads. Our hosting provider, Cloudflare, processes technical request data such as IP addresses to deliver the pages and protect the site.
Support email
When you write to us, we keep your message and our replies to help you and to improve Talki. Please do not send recordings or note text unless you choose to.
Talki Support, an AI assistant, answers first. It reads your message and answers only from the published guides and pages of talki.im; a second model from another provider checks each answer before it is sent. Billing, refunds, privacy and legal requests, and anything the guides do not cover go to a person. The assistant runs on Cloudflare and on language models reached through OpenRouter; they process the message to write the answer and are not given your recordings or notes. To reach a person directly, ask for one in your message.
Legal bases
Under the GDPR we rely on:
- performance of a contract to provide Talki and your account, verify subscriptions and answer support requests;
- consent for usage analytics and, in the App Store edition, for cloud processing; you can withdraw consent at any time;
- legitimate interests to secure our services, prevent abuse and keep the website running;
- legal obligations to keep financial records.
Retention
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Content in your Mac library | Until you delete it |
| Account, identities and sessions | Until you delete the account; sessions expire after 180 days |
| Email sign-in codes | 10 minutes, then unusable |
| Managed-model request content | Not kept after the request completes |
| Usage records for Talki Plus | As long as your subscription is active, then up to 12 months |
| Subscription and transaction records | As required by tax and accounting law, typically 5 years |
| Analytics events | Up to 24 months, without content |
| Support emails | Up to 3 years after the conversation ends |
| Website request logs | As short as our hosting provider allows |
Service providers and transfers
We use Apple (App Store, iCloud, speech framework), OpenRouter and model providers you choose, Cloudflare (website, purchase verification service and the support mailbox), OpenRouter and its model providers for answering support email and DigitalOcean (hosting for our optional analytics service). Some of them process data outside the European Economic Area. Where they do, we rely on adequacy decisions or the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.
Your rights
You can ask us to access, correct, delete or export your personal data, to restrict or object to processing, and to withdraw consent. Write to support@talki.im. You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority; in Poland this is the President of the Personal Data Protection Office (UODO).
Children
Talki is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their personal data.
Changes
We will update this page when Talki changes how it handles data and show the date at the top. For significant changes we will also tell you in the app.