Privacy Policy

Speakelle is a product of Trontra LLC (Trontra). This Privacy Policy is how we collect, store, use, and — with a very short list of exceptions — refuse to share personal information when you visit the public site, create an account, take a lesson, or subscribe.

It is the document we follow, not a summary of a longer one sitting somewhere else. The Terms and Conditions are the contract for using Speakelle; this page is the record of what we do with your data. If the two ever seem to disagree, write to us — they are meant to say the same thing in different jobs.

Questions, access or deletion requests, or anything else about your data go to hello@trontra.com. That is the address we watch.

Who we are

Speakelle is operated by Trontra LLC (“we”, “us”, “our”), a limited liability company. Trontra is the studio; Speakelle is the product. We are the organisation responsible for the information described in this policy. You can read more about the studio at www.trontra.com.

Trontra LLC
Email: hello@trontra.com

What this policy covers

This policy applies to the Speakelle website and the signed-in app: onboarding, lessons across speaking, listening, reading, and writing, recaps, retry drills, the review deck, the ladder, rehearsals, freestyle conversation, profile, plans, and the emails we send you about the account.

It applies whether you are on a free trial or a paid plan, and whether you are only reading a public page. It does not speak for other Trontra properties that publish their own notices. If we add a feature that collects something this page does not describe, we will update this page before that feature asks you for it.

“You” means the person using Speakelle. If you use it on behalf of an organisation, it means both you and that organisation — the same reading as in the Terms.

What we store

We store what we need to run your account and to make the next lesson useful. We do not store a parallel copy “for marketing,” and we do not buy lists of people to contact.

Account and sign-in

When you create an account we store the email address you use to sign in. If you choose a password, it is stored as a hash by our authentication provider — we never keep it in plain text, and we cannot read it back. If you sign in with a one-time code, the provider sends it to that inbox; the code itself is short-lived and is not something we keep.

Session cookies keep you signed in as you move between pages. They are there so the app knows it is you, not so we can follow you around the rest of the web.

Profile

You tell us a display name, your native language, the language you want to learn and the level you want to practise it at, and optionally what you need that language for — a goal, a few words of context, sometimes a date. You can also pick a voice and how fast the tutor should talk. All of that lives on your profile so every generated lesson can be aimed at you. You can change it in the app at any time.

Lessons, results, and practice over time

Speakelle generates a lesson when you ask for one. We store the topic you typed (or the ladder step you opened), the generated plan, and whether the lesson is still in progress or finished.

When a lesson ends we store its result: a score, the mistakes and corrections from that sitting, a recap, and — for speaking lessons — a text transcript of what you and the tutor said. For writing lessons we store the text you submitted and the feedback on it. For read-aloud lessons we store how each sentence went.

Practice does not stop at one sitting. We store review items built from your mistakes, each retry-drill attempt, and your progress on the ladder. That is how the product remembers what you still need, instead of generating every lesson as if you were new.

If you describe something real you need to rehearse — a visa interview, a shift handover, a call with a landlord — that description is stored as part of the lesson you asked us to make. Treat it as personal data we are holding for you, not as something we go looking through.

Voice minutes

Speaking is metered. For each live session we store when it started and ended, how many seconds were used, which voice engine served it, and how the session ended (you hung up, the tutor finished, the server reached the cap, or something failed). That record exists so your plan's allowance is applied from our clock, not from the browser. It is a duration record. It is not a recording of the call.

Billing

Stripe is the payment processor — for the free trial too, since a trial starts with a card. Stripe sees what it needs to charge you — typically your email, the price, and the payment method you enter on Stripe's own form. We store your plan, subscription status, renewal window, and Stripe's identifiers for the customer and the subscription. We never see a full card number, and we do not store one. Stripe does not receive your lessons, transcripts, or writing.

Reports and messages you send us

If you tap that something in a lesson looks wrong, we keep that note against the lesson so we can look at it. If you write to hello@trontra.com, we keep the correspondence so we can answer you.

What arrives automatically

Running a website produces ordinary technical records: the page requested, approximate location at a country or city level derived from the connection, browser and device type, and timestamps. We use a privacy-oriented analytics tool for page views, not an advertising pixel. If the app crashes, we may receive a technical error report (the page, the browser, a stack trace) so we can fix it. We do not use crash reports or page views to build a learning profile, and we do not use them to advertise.

What we do not store

This list is as important as the one above. Speakelle is a tutor, not a surveillance product.

• Recordings of your voice. The microphone is streamed live so the tutor can hear you. When the session ends we keep the text transcript for your recap and review — not the audio, not a waveform, not a file you could play back. Narration we generate for a listening story is our audio, not a recording of you.
• Payment card numbers, bank account details, government identity documents, or date of birth.
• Precise GPS location, your contacts, photos, files from your device, or access to other apps.
• Advertising identifiers, a tracking profile, a social graph, or a record of sites you visit outside Speakelle.
• Biometric templates. We do not score pronunciation with a stored voiceprint, and we do not keep one.

We do not use your lessons, transcripts, writing, or voice to train models for sale, for other customers, or for a general-purpose model we would then ship to someone else. Practice data exists so you can learn from it — recaps, review, the next lesson — not so a model can improve on your speech.

Voice, the microphone, and transcripts

Speaking lessons and read-aloud lessons need the microphone. The browser will ask your permission; we cannot hear you until you grant it. You can revoke that permission in the browser at any time. Without it, live conversation and reading aloud cannot run. Listening and writing do not need the mic.

While you are in a speaking lesson, audio from your microphone is sent to the voice model that is acting as the tutor, so it can hear you and reply in real time. Speech is turned into text so we can show captions, record mistakes, and write a recap if the call drops. That text is the transcript we store. The audio stream is not kept after the session.

The review deck has an optional microphone button as well. It does not use our tutor: it uses the speech recognition built into your browser, which turns what you say into text and shows it in the answer box as a hint. Depending on the browser, that happens on your device (Safari, iPhone and iPad) or on the servers of the browser's maker (Google for Chrome, Microsoft for Edge), under their privacy terms. We never receive that audio, and we do not store what it heard. Nothing in the deck needs the button: typing, or saying it without pressing anything, works the same.

Some speaking, listening and writing lessons can be taken with a video tutor, where it is offered. The tutor you see is an AI, not a person, and the call says so before you start, on screen for the whole call, and out loud at the start. The face and voice come from Tavus, our video provider, and the call runs over Daily, the video network Tavus uses. Your microphone audio goes to Tavus live, the same way it goes to the voice model in an ordinary speaking lesson. Your camera stays off: the video is the tutor's, shown to you, and nothing analyses your face. Video calls are not recorded. On a listening lesson, your quiz answers go to the tutor once they are marked, so it can talk you through the ones you missed. On a writing lesson, the tutor can help you plan before you write and talk you through your feedback afterwards. For that it gets the task and the feedback, which quotes the phrases from your writing that it corrects. Nothing is sent while you write. We keep the text transcript, as for any speaking lesson. Tavus also keeps its own copy of the conversation for the few minutes it takes to send us the transcript, and then we ask it to delete that copy for good. If something holds that up, we still ask for the copy to be deleted within about two hours of the call.

The tutor is an AI, not a person. It is instructed to stay in a coaching frame: if you disclose something personal or distressing, it should acknowledge it and return to practice rather than probe. If self-harm is expressed, it should give helpline information and stop coaching. That is a safety instruction, not a promise that a model will always get it right. Do not rely on Speakelle as a crisis service.

Topics you type, and lessons we generate, are checked so the product is not used to produce harmful content. A blocked topic is a refusal. It is not used to label you or to build a side profile.

How we use it

We use the information above to:

• Create your account, keep you signed in, and let you reset access to it.
• Generate lessons at the level you chose, including using recent mistakes so the next sitting is not a blank slate.
• Show recaps, the review deck, and retry drills, and keep ladder progress.
• Meter speaking minutes against your plan, run subscriptions, and show you what you have left.
• Moderate unsafe topics, diagnose outages, and keep the service reliable.
• Reply when you write to us, and look at reports you send.

We do not use this information to advertise Speakelle — or anyone else — to you on other sites. We do not sell it. We do not rent it.

We do not share your data

This is a promise about Speakelle, not a slogan. We do not sell personal information — not transcripts, not writing, not voice, not email, not what you need the language for. We do not share it with advertisers, data brokers, or other companies so they can use it for their own purposes. No ad networks. No “partners” who want a list. No licensing of learner audio or text to anyone else's training run or product. We do not sell or “share” personal information as those terms are used under California law.

Speakelle cannot run on a single machine in isolation. Operating it means computers have to process what you type and say. That processing exists to provide the feature you asked for, to you. It is not a side channel that turns your account into someone else's dataset. The categories of infrastructure are:

• hosting, so the site and the app can be reached;
• authentication and the database, so accounts and lessons persist and so one learner cannot read another's;
• Stripe, if you subscribe, so we never have to hold a card number. Stripe sees what it needs to charge you, and nothing about your lessons;
• voice and language-model providers, so the tutor can hear, speak, and generate a lesson;
• Tavus and Daily, only if you take a video lesson, so the video tutor can hear you, answer you, and appear on screen. They are told to delete each call once we have its transcript;
• error reporting and privacy-oriented analytics, so we can see that a page failed or that the site is up — not so we can advertise.

Those providers receive only what they need to do that job, and only on our instructions. They are not given your lessons, transcripts, or profile to train their models, to sell, or to use as their own product. During a speaking lesson, live audio has to reach the voice model or the tutor cannot hear you; as above, we do not keep that recording.

If a public authority makes a lawful demand we cannot resist, we will provide what the demand actually requires and no more. That is the exception, not a programme. We would not disclose for any other reason.

If Trontra LLC were ever acquired or reorganised, this information would transfer with the product under this policy — it would not become a list to be sold off to the side.

Cookies and what stays on your device

We use a small number of cookies and similar storage, and we do not use them for advertising.

• Session cookies — set when you sign in, so the app knows it is still you. They last while you stay signed in. Signing out clears them.
• Theme and colour palette — stored on your device so the next visit looks the way you left it. This does not come back to our servers as a profile.
• Analytics — page views, collected in a way that is not used to advertise to you and does not depend on a third-party marketing cookie.

You can block cookies in your browser. If you block the session cookie, you will not be able to stay signed in. The public pages will still load.

How long we keep it

Learning data — profile, lessons, transcripts, review items, retry attempts, ladder progress, voice-minute records — is kept for as long as the account is open. That is the point of the product: you should be able to open last month's recap and still see what you said.

When we delete an account, the learning data attached to it is deleted with it. Backup copies fall out of our systems on their ordinary rotation. We may retain a limited billing or tax record where the law requires us to, and we may retain correspondence about a request long enough to show we handled it.

If a lesson is still generating or a voice session is still open when something fails, we keep the incomplete row long enough to settle minutes and to show you an error — not as a second archive.

Security

Each account's lessons and profile are stored so that a signed-in learner can read their own data and not another person's. Passwords are hashed. The site is served over encrypted connections. Voice audio is not written to our disk as a recording.

No method of transmission or storage is perfect. We do not claim the product is immune to abuse or to a breach. If we become aware of a security incident that affects your personal information, we will tell you and the authorities as the law requires, and we will say what we know rather than wait for a perfect picture.

Children

Speakelle is not directed at children, and it is not available for children yet. The Terms require you to be at least 18, or the age of majority where you live if that is higher. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under that age.

We have not built the guardrails a child-appropriate product needs — around the tutor's behaviour, generated content, voice sessions, account controls, and parental involvement — and we will not pretend otherwise. There is no child mode, no family plan, and no under-18 permission flow hiding in settings. The tutor, the topics a learner can type, and a live conversation are designed for adults practising English, not for a child unsupervised.

We intend, later, to offer a version of Speakelle that is suitable for children. That will only happen after we have put strong safety guardrails around the system and said so clearly here and in the Terms. It is not available today.

If we learn that an account belongs to a person under 18, we will close it and delete the data attached to it. If you are a parent or guardian and you believe this has happened, write to hello@trontra.com with whatever you can share. We will treat that as urgent.

Your rights and choices

You do not need a special form. In the app you can correct your name, language, level, goal, and voice preferences yourself. For everything else, email hello@trontra.com from the address on the account.

You can ask us to:

• give you a copy of the personal information we hold;
• correct information that is wrong;
• delete your account and the learning data attached to it;
• restrict or object to a use of your information, where the law gives you that right;
• export what we hold in a reasonable electronic format, where the law gives you that right.

We will honor the rights that apply to you — including those under European, United Kingdom, and California law where they apply — and we will say so if we cannot do something you asked, and why. We may need to confirm that the request comes from the account holder. We will not charge for an ordinary request. Closing the account deletes the learner data tied to it; it does not, on its own, refund a period you have already paid for. That is in the Terms.

You can also sign out, stop using the product, or revoke microphone permission in the browser. Signing out does not delete the account; deletion does, and that is the email above.

Where information is processed

Trontra LLC uses infrastructure that may process information in the United States and in other countries. Those countries may have different data-protection laws than the country you are in. We do not move your lessons into a separate product, a research set, or another company's training corpus by sending them abroad. They travel with the systems that run Speakelle, under this policy.

Changes to this policy

If we change what we store or how we use it, we will change this page and the date at the top. For a change that is material — something that would reasonably affect whether you keep using Speakelle — we will also try to tell you in the product or by email to the address on the account.

Continuing to use Speakelle after an update means you are using it under the updated policy. If you do not agree, you can ask us to delete the account.

Contact

Trontra LLC
hello@trontra.com

That is the address for privacy questions, a copy of what we hold, a correction, a deletion, or a report that an account belongs to a child. See also the Terms and Conditions.