Phonema · Privacy policy · the same text as in the app · Terms of use

Privacy policy — Phonema

Last updated: October 30, 2026

In short: Phonema writes broad IPA on your phone, and for that nothing is sent anywhere. Only when you ask for more — narrow IPA, linking, the syllables mode for subtitles, a PDF, or the narrow column of the word list — the text travels to our Phonema service, is answered, and is not kept. No account, no name and no identifier travel with that text; like any connection over the internet, the request shows the internet address it comes from, which our host's request log keeps for 30 days (section 3). Nothing of yours is stored on that server at all. Everything worth keeping — your own words, your settings, your history — stays on your phone, unless you choose to put a copy in your own Google Drive, in a file on the phone, or hand it to another of your devices over your own Wi-Fi. This page says all of that in enough detail that you could check it.

1. Who we are

Phonema is made by NeuroPhonetics LLC, a limited liability company registered in the State of Minnesota, United States (https://NeuroPhonetics.com) — the company behind every program in this family and the seller on Google Play. This policy covers the Phonema app for Android and the Phonema service it talks to. Questions: .

2. What we collect about you: almost nothing

No account, no name, no email address, no advertising identifier, no analytics, no automatic crash reporting, no tracking of any kind. We do not build a profile of you and we have nothing to sell. The service is not told who is asking, and there is nowhere for it to write the answer down. The only things that can identify you at all are the internet address in our host's request log (section 3), a problem report you choose to email us, and — if you buy Phonema Pro — the order details Google Play gives us (section 9).

3. What leaves your phone: only the text you ask more of

Broad IPA is written on your phone, from the family's pronunciation table inside the app; the text you type, paste or share is not sent for it. The text leaves your phone only when you ask for something the phone cannot make: narrow IPA, linking, the syllables mode for subtitles, a PDF, or the narrow column of the word list. Then Phonema sends that text to the Phonema service, which answers, and the text is used for that one answer and not stored afterwards. No identifier travels with it, and the service is not told who asked.

• The words you fixed yourself in My words travel with that text, so the service can use your IPA for them rather than a dictionary form. They are used for that one answer and are not stored either. They belong to you: they live on your phone, and the service never keeps a copy of them.
• Where the service runs, and its log. The Phonema service runs on Google Cloud (Cloud Run, in the European Union, region europe-central2), which hosts it for us as our processor. For every request Google Cloud's request log records the time, the method and path, the status, the size, how long it took, the internet address it came from and the app's user agent — the ordinary line any web server writes. No log line carries your text. We use the log only to keep the service running and to stop abuse, and it is deleted after 30 days. The connection is encrypted (HTTPS).
• One word, to Google Translate, only when you tap Translate on a word you tapped. Phonema opens Google Translate in your browser or its app with that one word; Phonema itself sends nothing there, and what Google does with it is under Google's own privacy policy. Nothing is sent to Google otherwise.
• Update check (test versions only). Copies installed outside Google Play can check for a newer test version: when you press "Check now", or once a week if you switch that on, the app asks our test server, on our own home or private network, for one file listing the newest version. The request carries nothing about you or your device; the comparison is made on your phone. The version from Google Play has no update check; Google Play updates it.
• Help us (Settings → Help and about). Rate us opens Phonema's Google Play listing, Tell a friend opens Android's share sheet with a short note and a link, and Suggestions opens your own email app, addressed to . You choose the store, the app and the person, and you press send yourself; Phonema sends nothing by itself. To know whether to offer Rate us, the app asks Android which store installed it; that answer stays on your phone.
• If you would rather a passage never left your phone, do not paste it into Phonema.

4. What the server does, and what it holds between requests

It looks each word up in the pronunciation dictionary that ships inside it — the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary and a small list of pronunciations we wrote ourselves — applies the rules of the notation you chose, and answers. That is the whole of it.

Between requests it holds one thing: a table of *word → IPA* for the words it has been asked about, kept in memory to save looking them up twice. That is a dictionary, filled as it goes — the same kind of thing as the dictionary it is filled from. It is capped, and it contains no sentence of yours, nothing about who asked, and nothing that says what any one person was reading. Nothing else survives the answer: not your text, not your overrides, not the file of an export.

An export is built and immediately forgotten. The PDF is written into a temporary folder, read into memory, and the folder is deleted before the answer is sent. This is tested, not promised: a test in our code watches that folder and fails if anything outlives the request; it also checks that a correction you send once is not remembered, and that the service keeps words rather than requests.

Nothing is written to a database, a queue or a backup, because there is none: the service has no storage of any kind attached to it.

5. What stays on your phone

Your own words and their IPA (My words), your notation choice, your export settings, your transcription history, your voice choice, the pronunciation table for broad IPA (part of the app) — all in the app's private storage on the device. Android's own cloud backup does not copy them.

If the app crashes or hits an error, it keeps a short technical record of it — what failed and where in the code, the app and Android versions, and the time, with no text, words, books, recordings or file names of yours — on your device only, in storage that is not backed up; it is never sent automatically, and leaves your device only if you choose to send it in a problem report you can read first.

You choose how long these records are kept — 7, 30 or 90 days, 30 until you choose — and older ones are deleted on the device. The choice reaches your paired devices with the next Wi-Fi sync.

6. Copies you choose to make

• Google Drive: after you sign in with Google, Phonema saves one small file in a Neurophonetics/Phonema folder in your own Drive — your settings, your own words, your history (the texts you transcribed and your choices for them) and your places — so a new phone or your other devices get them back. If you switch on Also save exports to Google Drive, each export is saved there too. It uses the drive.file permission, which reaches only files Phonema itself created — it cannot see the rest of your Drive. When you sign in, the app keeps your Google account's email address on this device, only to show you where it saves; it goes nowhere else.
• A file on this phone: Documents/Neurophonetics/Phonema, visible in the Files app, so you can copy it, sync it with an app of your own, or keep it in your own backup.
• Wi-Fi sync: the same file — settings, your own words, history and places — can be handed straight to another of your devices on the same Wi-Fi. Nothing is uploaded anywhere; the two devices talk to each other. The six-digit code you type never leaves your devices. The household key travels only once, encrypted, when you pair two devices. After that, the file travels between paired devices signed, but not encrypted, inside your home network, so pair and sync only on a network you trust. Any device on your Wi-Fi can see that Phonema runs on this device, and its name, maker and model: that is how your devices find each other.
• Logs from your paired devices: when you write a problem report and choose another of your devices, Phonema asks that device, over the same Wi-Fi pairing, for its problem and crash log, redacted as this phone's is, and adds it to the report you read before sending. Only devices you paired and switched on in "Devices" are asked; nothing goes through a server of ours, and nothing is sent until you send the email yourself.
• Exports: a PDF, text, audio or video you export is saved in Documents/Neurophonetics/Phonema on this phone (and in your Drive if you switched that on) and goes to whichever app you pick in the share sheet. Each export carries a short line, "Made with Phonema · NeuroPhonetics.com".
• Our other apps on this phone. Lectio and Mimesis can hand text to Phonema for its IPA, and Phonema can hand text on: Practice in Antiphon sends the text and a recording of the phone's own voice reading it to the Antiphon app, which sends the audio to Antiphon's server (ours) to compare your imitation with it; Chunk in Semantica sends the text to the Semantica app, which sends it to Semantica AI — our service on Google Cloud, which asks Anthropic's AI model to write the answer and keeps nothing — and hands the chunks back, marked "Written by AI (Claude) — may contain mistakes". Each needs Phonema Pro, and Semantica AI (or Semantica's 3 free answers a day) or what Antiphon itself requires; Antiphon's and Semantica's privacy policies say exactly what they send and keep. This goes from app to app on the phone, protected so that only our own apps can do it.

Apart from the hand-offs to our other apps described just above, every copy goes to your Drive, your folder or your other device, under your own account. We never see it, and nothing is synchronised unless you switch it on.

7. Speaking a word aloud

When Phonema says a word, it asks the text-to-speech engine that is part of your phone. Which engine that is, and whether it works offline, is your phone's setting; that engine's own maker decides what it does with the word. Phonema sends nothing of its own.

8. No word of yours goes to another company — unless you choose Translate or Chunk in Semantica

A word of yours reaches another company only in two ways, and only when you choose them: your own tap on Translate in the sheet of a word you tapped, which opens Google Translate with that one word under Google's own privacy policy (section 3); and Chunk in Semantica (section 6), which sends the text through the Semantica app to Semantica AI, where Anthropic's AI model writes the chunks for us and nothing is kept. Nothing is sent to Google, Anthropic or anyone else otherwise.

The phone and the service answer from what they carry: the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (© Carnegie Mellon University, used under its license, shown on the app's Licenses page) and a small list of pronunciations we wrote ourselves. No other dictionary is in the service you use. Two things are worth naming because they are the only ways a word could ever go further from the service, and neither is on:

• The neural fallback. For a word no dictionary lists, the engine can be built with a grapheme-to-phoneme model. That model runs inside the service, on the same machine, and talks to nobody. It is not installed in the version we run: a word nothing lists comes back without a transcription rather than as a guess.
• The remote model. The engine can be pointed at Google's Gemini to compare its transcriptions with our own during development. That sends the words to Google, so it is off unless an API key is set on the server, and it is never on in the service the app talks to. If that ever changes, this page will say so before it does.

Nothing in Phonema is used to train anything, ours or anyone else's.

9. Google Play, and buying Phonema Pro

Google Play handles the download, updates and payment, under Google's own privacy policy, and Google is the seller of Phonema Pro. When you buy it, Google Play keeps the purchase with your Google account and tells the app on your phone that this account owns Pro; the app keeps only that answer — Play's purchase token and whether Pro is unlocked — in its private storage, and asks Google Play again to restore it on another device. No server of ours takes part. Like every seller on Google Play, we receive from Google the order details it gives developers — an order number, the product, the price, the date and your country or region, which tax requires — and use them only for accounting, refunds and taxes. We never see your card.

10. Permissions

• Internet — to reach the Phonema service, Google Drive and Google Play.
• Network and Wi-Fi state, Wi-Fi multicast — only for Wi-Fi sync: to know whether there is a network, and to find your own paired devices on it.
• Family hand-off — a permission only our own apps hold, so Lectio or Mimesis can hand text to Phonema, and Phonema to Antiphon or Semantica, on the same phone (section 6).

Phonema does not ask for the microphone, the camera, your contacts or your location; it sees only files you pick or share into it.

11. Security

Requests to the Phonema service travel over HTTPS. Wi-Fi sync is described in section 6: the pairing is encrypted, later files are signed but not encrypted, inside your own network.

12. Keeping and deleting your data

• On the server: nothing of yours to delete. Your text, your overrides and your exports are not kept. The request log (section 3) deletes itself after 30 days.
• On the phone: uninstalling the app removes its private storage. Files you saved in Documents, and copies in your Drive, stay until you delete them yourself.
• Your purchase: Google Play keeps it with your Google account, under Google's privacy policy, and the order details Google gives us are kept as long as accounting and tax law require. Uninstalling the app removes its own copy of the purchase state; your purchase stays with your Google account and is restored when you install again.

13. Your rights

Depending on where you live — under the GDPR in the EU and UK, or state laws such as the CCPA in California — you have rights over your personal data: to see it, correct it, delete it, or object to how it is used, and to complain to your data protection authority. The only personal data we could hold is the request log, a problem report you emailed us and the order details Google gives us for a purchase, used to run the service, answer you and keep the accounts, which is our legitimate interest and, for the purchase, our contract with you. We do not sell personal data or share it for advertising. Write to .

14. Paying

Phonema Pro is a one-time purchase through Google Play (section 9). Because of it, Google Play keeps your purchase with your Google account and we keep the order details Google gives every seller, for accounting and tax. Nothing else about you is stored.

15. Children

Phonema is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect their data.

16. Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes and the new text appears in the app and at NeuroPhonetics.com.

17. Contact

NeuroPhonetics LLC · 202 N Cedar Ave Ste 1, Owatonna, MN 55060-2306, USA

· · https://NeuroPhonetics.com