The short version
VOCEN measures how you speak English. To do that it has to hear you. This page explains exactly what that means in practice, because a product that asks for your voice owes you a plain answer.
- Your recordings are transient by default. Audio is analysed and then deleted — at the latest twenty-four hours after it was made.
- Keeping audio is opt-in. If you turn on Before / After, VOCEN keeps at most twenty recordings, clears anything older than thirty days, and gives you one control that permanently deletes all of them.
- We do not sell your data, and there are no advertising or tracking SDKs in the app.
- You are identified by Sign in with Apple. If you use Apple's private relay, we never see your real email address.
- We never see your payment details. Apple handles billing.
This summary is here for readability. The sections below are the operative text, and they govern where the two differ.
What we collect
We collect only what the measurement needs. Each category below exists because a specific feature would not work without it.
| Category | What it contains | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Account identity | An Apple user identifier, and the email address Apple passes on — which is a private relay address unless you chose to share your real one. | So your score follows you across devices and can be restored. |
| Goals and context | The purposes you selected during onboarding, your role family and seniority if you told us, and the difficulties you picked. | To shape prompts, scenarios and which skill is worth practising. |
| Speech recordings | The audio you record in a session, plus its duration and basic quality measures. | It is the evidence the score is computed from. |
| Transcripts and timings | What you said, with word-level timing and pronunciation alignment. | Pauses, fillers, pace and pronunciation are all derived from these. |
| Derived measurements | Scores and dimension values, skill-graph nodes, feedback text, saved phrases and their review schedule. | This is the product: your history and what it says about your progress. |
| Subscription status | Whether an active VOCEN Pro entitlement exists, and when it expires. | To unlock Pro features. No card number ever reaches us. |
| Technical and usage events | App version, device model, OS version, coarse error diagnostics and counts of the actions you take in the app. | To fix crashes, enforce fair-use limits and understand which parts of the loop work. |
We do not collect your contacts, photos, location, health data, advertising identifiers, or anything from other apps.
Your recordings, and how long they live
This is the part that matters most, so it gets its own section.
Default: transient
When you finish a session, the audio is uploaded to a private storage path that only your own account can read. It is transcribed and analysed, and then the audio file is deleted — as soon as analysis completes, or twenty-four hours after it was recorded, whichever comes first. The transcript, the measurements and the score remain, because they are your history. The sound of your voice does not.
Opt-in: Before / After
If you switch on audio retention, VOCEN keeps completed recordings so you can hear the difference between your first attempt and a later one. That archive is deliberately small:
- at most twenty recordings are kept;
- files older than thirty days are cleared on the next sync;
- the setting is re-checked on the server before any file is stored, so switching it off stops new uploads immediately;
- Profile has a single control that permanently deletes every retained recording — without deleting your scores or your feedback.
Microphone access
VOCEN records only while a session is open and you have started it. There is no background listening, no always-on microphone and no keyword detection. Before iOS asks for microphone permission, the app explains in its own words what the microphone is for.
Sessions are open-ended prompts about your own life and work. Please don't read out passwords, card numbers, medical details or anyone else's personal information — anything you say becomes a transcript we store as part of your history.
How your speech is analysed
Analysis is not a single black box. It runs as a job with distinct stages, and different specialists handle different parts of it. All of them act as our processors under contract, on our instructions, and none of them may use your speech to train their own models.
| Processor | What it receives | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Azure Speech | The session audio. | Transcription with word-level timings, and phoneme-level pronunciation assessment. |
| Google Gemini | The transcript and derived metrics — never the audio file. | Language analysis, feedback text, rewrites and scenario generation, returned as validated structured output. |
| Supabase | Your account record, measurements, transcripts and any retained audio. | Authentication, database and private file storage with per-user access rules. |
| Apple | Your sign-in and your purchase. | Sign in with Apple, and all subscription billing through the App Store. |
Automated decisions
The VOCEN Score is produced automatically. It is a learning aid, not a decision about you: it does not determine access to employment, education, credit or any other legal or similarly significant outcome. It is not an accredited qualification, and no institution recognises it. You can stop using it, delete it, or disregard it at any time.
Why we are allowed to use it
If you are in the UK, the EEA or another region with comparable law, these are the legal bases we rely on.
- Performance of a contract — recording, analysing and scoring your speech, and keeping your history. This is the service you asked for.
- Consent — for AI processing of your speech, which you give before the first recording, and separately for keeping audio beyond analysis. You can withdraw either at any time, in the app.
- Legitimate interests — keeping the service secure, preventing abuse, controlling cost through fair-use limits, and fixing what breaks.
- Legal obligation — where we must keep records, for example for tax on subscriptions.
Voice recordings are treated with care regardless of category. We do not use voice data for biometric identification of any kind — VOCEN measures speech, it does not recognise speakers.
Storage and security
Data is stored on managed infrastructure in the European Union and the United States, depending on the processor. Where data leaves your region, transfers rely on Standard Contractual Clauses or an equivalent approved mechanism.
- Traffic is encrypted in transit; stored data is encrypted at rest.
- Audio lives in a private bucket under a path scoped to your user ID, enforced by row-level security rather than by convention.
- Every request that touches your data is checked against your authenticated session, server-side.
- Analysis endpoints that talk to AI providers are internal-only and cannot be called from the app directly.
No system is perfect. If we discover a breach affecting your data, we will notify you and the relevant regulator within the time the law requires.
How long we keep things
| Data | Kept for | |
|---|---|---|
| Session audio (default) | Until analysis completes, or 24 hours — whichever is first | Then deleted. |
| Session audio (opt-in) | Up to 20 recordings, up to 30 days each | Deletable at any time from Profile. |
| Transcripts, scores, skills, phrases | While your account exists | This is your history. |
| Usage events | 180 days | Pruned automatically. |
| Purchase records | As long as tax and accounting law requires | Held by us and by Apple. |
Free accounts can read the last seven days of score history. Older entries are hidden at the API layer, not deleted — subscribing to Pro restores the full record rather than starting a new one.
Your rights and controls
You can, at any time:
- Delete your retained recordings — Profile → Audio, one control, immediate and permanent.
- Withdraw consent to keep audio — the same screen. Analysis of new sessions stops storing anything.
- Delete your account — Profile → Account. This removes your identity, recordings, transcripts, scores and phrases. It cannot be undone.
- Request a copy of your data in a portable format, by writing to us.
- Ask us to correct anything inaccurate, or to restrict or object to a particular use.
Write to privacy@vocen.app and we will answer within thirty days. We do not charge for this, and we will not degrade your service for asking. If you are unhappy with our answer, you may complain to your local data protection authority.
Deleting VOCEN from your phone does not delete your account. Use the in-app control, or write to us and we will do it for you.
Children
VOCEN is not directed at children. You must be at least 13 to use it, and at least 16 in countries where that is the age of digital consent. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone below that age; if we learn that we have, we delete it and the associated account.
Analytics, advertising and tracking
- There are no third-party advertising or analytics SDKs in the app.
- We do not use the Advertising Identifier and we do not ask for tracking permission, because we do not track you across apps or websites.
- Product analytics are our own typed events — which screens were reached, which actions succeeded, which errors occurred — attached to your account, not to an advertising profile.
- This website sets no cookies and runs no third-party analytics. It loads web fonts from Google Fonts, which receives your IP address as part of that request.
Changes to this policy
If we change something material — a new processor, a new category of data, a longer retention window — we will update the date at the top, and tell you in the app before the change takes effect. Continuing to use VOCEN after that means you accept the updated policy. Where the law requires fresh consent, we will ask for it rather than assume it.
Contact
VOCEN is operated by the developer of the VOCEN iOS application, who is the data controller for the purposes of this policy.
- Privacy and data requests — privacy@vocen.app
- Everything else — support@vocen.app
- Or use the contact page.
See also the Terms of Service, which cover subscriptions, acceptable use and what the score does and does not claim to be.