Chirp
Nothing you say leaves the phone.
Chirp contains no networking code of its own. There is no server of mine, no account, and nothing for me to hold.
What is collected
Nothing
No analytics, no advertising identifier, no third-party SDKs, and nothing reported to anyone. This page is not measured either.
A crash
If the app ever stops on its own it leaves a note for itself on the phone, so the next launch knows what happened. It is not sent anywhere, and nobody but you can read it.
What is stored, and where
Audio
Never written to disk. Held in memory for the length of one sentence.
Conversations
Text only, on your device, deleted after 30 days.
Languages and voices
Your choices, on your device.
Purchases
Whether the app has been unlocked, and nothing else. Payment is the App Store’s: Chirp never sees a card number, a name or an address.
Anywhere else
Nothing.
Deleting the app deletes all of it. There is no backup I hold and nothing to export from a service, because there is no service.
Apple’s part
On-device
Speech recognition, translation and the spoken voice are Apple’s, running on this phone. Chirp asks iOS for them; iOS does the work locally.
The one network call
Downloading a language pack or a voice goes through Apple, and is the only time the network is used at all. Apple’s own terms cover that exchange; Chirp neither sees nor keeps anything from it.
Telling the other person
Spoken, once
When a conversation starts, Chirp says one sentence aloud in the other person’s language: that a translator is in use, and — if the written record is on — that it keeps one. It states this rather than asking, because a question demands an answer and manufactures exactly the awkwardness the sentence exists to remove.
The record
Turning it off is one switch, and the spoken sentence changes with it. Conversations are text only and are deleted after 30 days.
Contact
One person