Privacy Policy

01Who we are

speakthai.ai teaches Thai to English speakers by leveraging the best of AI and human teaching methods. Lessons are generated for each learner by AI, and they're taught by Surang, our own AI teacher. You also have the option to work with a paid human Thai tutor for a more robust learning path.

The service is operated from the United States by its founder, Michael Dolan, who is the data controller for everything described in this policy.

The outside services we use are named individually in §7.

02What we collect

If you use speakthai.ai without an account

You can use much of speakthai.ai without signing up. Even then, our servers record some technical information, mostly to stop abuse and control costs:

• A device identifier stored in your browser
• A browser fingerprint and a hashed version of your IP address — the IP address itself is not stored in readable form
• Which features you used and when, and the cost of any AI-generated lesson we produced for you

If you create an account

• Your email address, and a display name if you set one
• What you told us during onboarding — why you're learning Thai, your pace, and a trip date if you gave one
• Your learning record — lessons taken, answers given, mistakes made, words you're practising, review scheduling, streaks, and a running estimate of your fluency over time
• Settings and preferences, including whether you've agreed to marketing email
• Anything you choose to send us — feedback or bug reports you submit in the app, messages sent through the contact form, and your answer if you tell us how you found us
• Your voice pitch profile — a small set of numbers describing the range of your speaking voice, used to grade tones. This is not a recording and cannot be played back or listened to.

If you ask about working with a tutor

If you use the "work with a real tutor" option, we collect what you tell us — what you'd like help with, any deadline you mention, and an email address so we can reply. We use it to get in touch about tutoring, and for nothing else. You can ask us to delete it at any time.

Voice recordings — only if you opt in

We don't record you at all today — recorded tutor review isn't currently offered. If it launches, it would happen only on a paid plan and only if you explicitly opt in. §4 sets out the terms in full, in advance.

What we don't collect

We don't collect your date of birth, your location, your contacts, or any payment card details. We hash your IP address for abuse prevention, as described above, and we don't use it to work out where you are. We don't use advertising trackers, and we don't sell data to anyone, ever.

03Why we collect it, and our legal basis

Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time and we'll stop — see §8.

03aLive lessons with a human tutor

If you buy live 1:1 lessons, you meet your tutor in a scheduled session. The session is not recorded — not by us, not for review, not for training.

Your tutor sees your learning record: the words you're working on, your practice results and your progress, so the lesson picks up where the app left off. Your tutor works from Thailand — §7 covers what that means for your data.

04Voice recordings

A person would listen, not Surang. If this launches, recordings would be reviewed by a human tutor — a person, not Surang. Surang is the AI teacher you practise with in the app, and Surang is not who would hear these recordings.

What would be recorded — and what would not. We would record only during the speaking exercises in a lesson, and only when you're on a tutor-review plan and have opted in. We don't record during the rest of a lesson. Within a speaking exercise the recorder runs for the exercise rather than switching on and off for individual words, and the app shows a clear indicator the whole time it's on. At the end of each session we tell you how many recordings were kept and when they expire. We never record outside a speaking exercise, and we never record in the background.

You must be 18 or older to turn recording on. We don't knowingly record anyone under 18.

How long we keep it. Recordings are kept for 30 days from the day they're made, then deleted automatically. They exist for one reason — so your tutor can write your report card — and they go once that's done.

Your recordings are never used to train AI. Not ours, not anyone else's. This is absolute. See §6 for the difference between this and AI helping write your report card, which it does.

Separately, and entirely optional: you can let us use the pitch shapes from your recordings — the tone curves the app already measures, not the audio itself — to improve how speakthai.ai grades pronunciation. This is a separate tick-box. You can leave it unticked, or change your mind later, and declining changes nothing about your report cards or your lessons.

We treat those pitch shapes as your personal data, exactly like the recordings they came from: the same 30-day limit, and the same deletion rights — they go when you delete your recordings, when you withdraw consent, and when you delete your account. We don't claim they're anonymous and we don't keep them beyond that.

What we never do with your recordings

• We never sell them, and never share them with advertisers
• We never use your voice to identify or authenticate you — speakthai.ai measures how you pronounce things, never who you are
• We never give your tutor your email address, your real name, or any way to contact you directly

Who can access a recording. Your tutor, to coach you. And us, for support and technical troubleshooting — we'd rather tell you that than claim only your tutor can ever hear it. Those access events are logged. Nobody else has access; the outside services involved are listed in §7, and only one of them ever holds a recording.

Deleting your recordings

You have three separate ways out, and all of them work:

1. Delete them whenever you want. There's a control in Settings that deletes every recording we hold for you, straight away. No waiting period, no undo. You don't need a reason, you don't need to withdraw consent, and you don't need to wait for the 30 days to run out.
2. Turn recording off. Also in Settings. We stop recording immediately and your tutor loses access to your existing recordings at the same moment — nobody can hear them from that point on. We then hold them, unused, for 7 days before deleting them, purely so that turning the setting off by mistake doesn't destroy work you wanted to keep. Turn it back on within those 7 days and everything is restored. If you'd rather not wait, use option 1 — that deletes immediately.
3. Delete your account. Your recordings are deleted along with it, immediately — neither the 30-day period nor the 7-day window continues to run.

We'll email you when you turn recording off, so a setting you changed by accident doesn't quietly become permanent.

In all three cases we delete the audio file itself, the database record of it, any notes or transcript derived from it, and any report cards written from it. We don't merely hide it from you. This means deleting your recordings also removes the report cards built on them — if you want to keep a report card, save a copy before you delete.

05How long we keep everything else

When you delete your account we delete your personal data. Some anonymous, aggregated records — counts and costs that can't be linked back to you — may remain.

06Artificial intelligence in speakthai.ai

Your lessons are generated by AI, and AI helps write your report cards. We know this may seem obvious based on our company name, but we want you to hear directly from us where we use AI.

Your learning data is sent to our AI provider to generate lessons. That includes what you're working on, your level, and your recent mistakes. It does not include your email address.

Your report card is drafted by AI from your results and your tutor's notes, then reviewed by your tutor before you see it. The recording itself is never sent to any AI service. It stays in our storage and only ever goes to your tutor's browser. No third party ever hears your voice.

Nothing you give us is used to train AI models — not ours, not our providers'. The one exception is the optional pitch-shapes tick-box described in §4, which is off unless you turn it on, and which never involves the audio.

AI-generated lessons can contain mistakes. speakthai.ai is a language-teaching product and a confident error is the failure mode that matters most. If something looks wrong, tell us — the feedback control in the app exists for exactly this, and a native-speaker reviewer checks flagged material.

07Who else touches your data

These are the only outside services involved. Each acts on our instructions and none of them may use your data for their own purposes.

Only one of them ever holds a recording. Supabase stores your audio because that's where our storage lives. Anthropic sees lesson prompts and never a recording. Google Text-to-Speech only sends audio out to you. Resend only sees email addresses. Stripe only sees what it needs to take a payment. No AI provider, and no third party, ever receives your voice — the only exception is a legal one, covered just below.

If that ever needs to change, any new service that would touch learner audio requires a written data-processing agreement, a binding commitment not to train on it, and a fresh consent request from you — we'll ask again rather than rely on the answer you gave today. We've deliberately not written a vague "we may share with service providers" clause here, because that would be a way of pre-consenting you to something neither of us can see yet.

When the law requires it. We may have to disclose data if we're compelled by valid legal process — a court order, a subpoena, or a binding request from law enforcement. We'd tell you if that happened, unless we were legally barred from doing so.

If the business changes hands. If speakthai.ai is ever sold, merged, or has its assets transferred, your data may transfer with it. Whoever took it on would be bound by this policy, and we'd tell you before anything changed.

Your tutor. If you buy live lessons, your tutor works with you from Thailand. Your tutor sees your learning record and your practice results, and the name you choose to go by in lessons. Your tutor doesn't see your email address or any way to contact you outside speakthai.ai. Because your tutor is in Thailand, your learning record is accessed from there — see the transfer note below.

Transfers outside the UK and EEA. If you're in the UK or the EEA, your data is processed in the United States and, where you work with a tutor, in Thailand. Neither is covered by a UK or EU adequacy decision for all purposes, so these transfers rely on appropriate safeguards with each provider. Every tutor engaged by speakthai.ai is under a written agreement covering data protection and that transfer before being given access to any learner's record.

Payments. When you pay for live lessons, the payment is handled by Stripe. Your card details go directly to Stripe — we never see or hold your card number. We receive a record that a payment was made and what it was for, so that we can support you and keep proper records. Stripe is a payment processor in its own right and handles your card data under its own privacy policy.

08Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• See what we hold about you
• Correct anything wrong
• Delete your account and your data
• Export your data in a portable form — your account details, your learning record, your coaching notes, and a list of any voice recordings we hold with their dates. The recordings themselves are not included; if you want the audio, write to us.
• Withdraw consent for voice recording or marketing email at any time
• Object to our processing, or ask us to restrict it

Most of these are self-serve in Settings, which is faster than emailing us. For anything else, write to the address in §12 and we'll respond within one month. If a request is complicated we may need longer, and we'll tell you if that happens. You'll never be charged, and we'll never make the service worse for you because you asked.

We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request — we'd rather ask you an extra question than hand your data to someone pretending to be you.

If you're in the UK or the EEA and you think we've got something wrong, you can complain to your national data protection authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. We'd rather you told us first, but it's your right either way.

09Children

speakthai.ai is not intended for children under 13, and you must be at least 13 to use it. We don't knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If we learn that we have, we delete it promptly.

Voice recording has a higher floor: you must be 18 or older, because a real person listens to those recordings. See §4.

If you're a parent or guardian and believe your child has given us information, contact us at the address in §12 and we'll remove it.

10Security

Your data is held in access-controlled databases and file storage. Recordings are held in private storage and are reachable only through short-lived links our servers issue — they're never publicly accessible and can't be reached by guessing a URL. Access is limited to your tutor, for recordings and progress only, and to speakthai.ai's operator. Access to recordings is logged.

We never use your voice to identify or authenticate you. speakthai.ai analyses how you pronounce Thai — the shape and pitch of what you say — and never uses your voice as a way of recognising who you are. This is a commitment, not just current practice.

We're a small operation and we'd rather be honest than reassuring: no system is perfectly secure. If a breach ever affects your data, we'll tell you and the relevant regulator as the law requires.

11Cookies and local storage

We don't use advertising or tracking cookies. speakthai.ai stores information in your browser to keep you signed in and to remember your progress and settings. Clearing your browser storage signs you out and removes locally-held progress; anything synced to your account stays safe.

12Contact us

Email: privacy@speakthai.ai

This address is monitored by a person — not a ticketing system, and not Surang or any other AI. We aim to reply within a few days, and within 30 days at the outside for anything that counts as a formal request about your data.

13Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle your data we'll update this page and change the date at the top. For anything significant — a new purpose, a new recipient, a longer retention period — we'll tell you in the app rather than relying on you to notice. Where the change affects something you consented to, we'll ask you again rather than assume your old answer still applies.