Privacy · last updated 19 September 2026

What happens to your voice

You are about to speak private things into someone's software. You should know exactly where that goes. This page is written to be read, not to be survived.

The short version

Your recording is sent to OpenAI, in the United States, to be transcribed and translated. There is no other option today.
OpenAI may keep it for up to 30 days to detect abuse, then deletes it. They do not train their models on it.
We never write your audio, transcripts or translations to disk. They pass through memory and are gone.
There is no account, so we hold no name, email, phone number or password.
No cookies. No analytics. No advertising. No third-party scripts of any kind.
Because of the first two points, this app is not appropriate for privileged, clinical or legally sensitive conversations. See below — we would rather lose the sale.

What happens, step by step

You hold the button and speak. Your phone records compressed audio, about 20 KB for a typical sentence. Nothing has left your phone yet.
You let go. The recording is sent over an encrypted connection to our server.
Our server forwards it to OpenAI to be turned into text, and then sends that text — along with the recent conversation, so pronouns and short answers still make sense — to be translated.
The translation comes back and is shown and spoken on the phones in the conversation. If you chose the natural voice, the translated text is sent to OpenAI once more to be read aloud.
Our server keeps none of it. The audio exists in memory for the seconds it takes to process, and is never written to disk.

What we store

On our server, one small file, holding only this:

A random identifier your browser generated. It is not derived from your phone, your number or you. It is a random string.
How many translations that identifier has left and has used.
The date it was first seen.
Gift codes, their value, and whether they have been redeemed.

That is the entire contents. No audio, no transcripts, no translations, no names, no contact details, no location.

What we don't store

Your recordings. Held in memory during processing, never saved.
Your transcripts or translations. Same.
Your conversation. It lives in your phone's memory while the app is open, and disappears when you close it. The conversation log inside the app is not backed up anywhere.
Group conversations. A shared room exists only in server memory. It is deleted when the host leaves, and automatically after four hours.

Our server logs record errors and credit redemptions. They never contain what anyone said.

What OpenAI does with it

Transcription, translation and the natural voice are all performed by OpenAI on servers in the United States. As of their published policy:

They do not train their models on data sent through the API by default.
They may retain inputs and outputs for up to 30 days to provide the service and identify abuse, after which it is removed unless they are legally required to keep it.
Access is limited to authorised employees and specialist contractors bound by confidentiality, for abuse investigation and legal compliance.
Data is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.2+) and at rest (AES-256). They have completed a SOC 2 audit.

Source: OpenAI's enterprise privacy commitments. We have quoted their terms rather than paraphrasing them into something more comfortable.

What is kept on your phone

Stored locally in your browser, never sent to us except where noted:

Your random identifier, so your remaining translations follow you between visits. This is the one item sent with each request.
Your chosen languages and voice preference.

Clearing your browser data erases all of it — including any translations you have paid for, because there is no account to restore them from. That is the genuine cost of not making you sign up.

Things we do not do

No cookies.
No analytics or tracking of any kind. We do not know how many people use this or what they do with it.
No advertising, and nothing sold or shared with anyone.
No third-party scripts, fonts or embeds. Every page loads only from this domain.
No profile of you, because we have nothing to build one from.

One honest footnote: whoever hosts this site sees connection records, including IP addresses, in the ordinary way that any web server does.

Please read this part

Where this app is not appropriate

Because recordings leave the country, may be held for up to 30 days, and we offer no data processing agreement, Mama Translate should not be used for conversations that carry a professional duty of confidentiality.

Clinical care. Use your organisation's approved interpreting service. Health information is special category data and this app is not assessed or approved for it.
Legal advice or anything privileged. Use a certified interpreter. We cannot give you a processing agreement to put on file.
Asylum, immigration or safeguarding. The people in these conversations often have the most to lose, and the least ability to consent meaningfully.
Anything safety-critical. Not a privacy point, but the same principle: there is a delay and speech can be misheard.

If you need this app to be usable in those settings, the honest answer today is that it is not. We would rather say so than sell you something you would have to defend later.

Telling the other person

The other people in a conversation are speaking into your phone, and they may not know where their words are going. We think you should tell them, in plain words: "this app sends what we say to a translation service abroad." If they are uncomfortable, that is a reasonable thing to be.

If you are using the natural voice, tell people the voice they hear is AI-generated. OpenAI's usage policies require that disclosure, and it is the decent thing regardless.

Children

This app is not designed for children to use on their own. An adult may of course use it to talk with a child, which is one of its better uses.

Deleting your data

Clear your browser data for this site and everything on your phone is gone. The remaining record on our side is a random identifier and a number, with no way to connect it to you. To have that row removed as well, send us the identifier and we will delete it.

When this changes

If we ever begin storing conversations, add analytics, or move processing somewhere new, this page will say so and the date at the top will change. We will not quietly broaden what we do and leave the page as it was.

Contact

[email protected] — for deletion requests, questions, or to tell us this page is wrong about something.