Privacy

Rostrum is a free daily speaking trainer. It draws a topic, you speak into the microphone for a few minutes, and it tells you how you said it. This page says exactly what that costs you in data, without the usual theatre.

Your voice is never stored

When you stop speaking, the recording is sent to Groq, a company in the United States, which transcribes it with Whisper and writes the coaching notes. Then it is discarded. Rostrum keeps no copy of the audio — not for a month, not for an hour, not as a backup. What survives a recording is text.

What is kept

Everything Rostrum keeps is filed under one id: an anonymous device cookie in this browser by default, or — if you choose to sign in — your account. Under that id:

• the transcript of what you said
• the delivery numbers measured from it — pace, filler words, stalls
• the coach's notes and the score
• page visits: which page, which day, the coarse country the hosting provider reports for your connection, and the site that linked you here

What is not kept

No audio. No password. Unless you sign in, nothing that says who you are — no name, no email address, no account, no profile; only that this browser came back.

If you sign in

Signing in is optional, and only to save your progress. If you choose to sign in with Google, Rostrum receives from Google your name and email address — nothing else: no contacts, no Drive, no posting on your behalf. They are used for one thing, to be your account, so your rounds follow you from one device to the next instead of living in a single browser. They are held by Supabase (the same database, in its authentication store), never sold and never emailed. Deleting your data — below — erases them with everything else and signs you out.

Who else touches it

• Groq (United States) — transcription and coaching. The recording and the transcript pass through it; what Groq then does is governed by Groq's own terms.
• Supabase — the database the text is stored in, and (if you sign in) the authentication store that holds your name and email.
• Google — only if you sign in. It handles the sign-in and passes Rostrum your name and email; what Google does with the fact that you signed in is governed by Google's own terms.
• Vercel — hosting. It serves the pages and is where the coarse country comes from.

Nothing is sold. Nothing is advertised against. No third-party analytics is loaded — the visit counting is Rostrum's own, on the same anonymous id. Search engines are asked not to index anything here.

How long it is kept

Until you delete it. Your data shows what is held for this browser and deletes all of it — sessions, visits and the id row — in one step. There is no other expiry: Rostrum would rather you delete it deliberately than promise a clear-out it does not perform.

One honest catch: the id lives in this browser's cookie. Clearing your cookies does not delete anything — it orphans it. The rows stay, and neither Rostrum nor you can connect them to you any more. If you want it gone, delete it first.

Your rights

India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 is the framework Rostrum works to. It gives you the right to know what is held about you, to have it corrected, to have it erased, and to withdraw your consent. Here all four meet on one page: Your data lists what is held and erases it immediately, and withdrawing consent is that same deletion plus not recording again.

Correction is the odd one: what is held is a machine's record of what you said and what it measured, so there is no address or spelling to put right. If a record is wrong or unwanted, deletion is the remedy, and it is instant. If you would rather ask a person, write to the contact below.

Who is responsible

Rostrum is run by Urgian Padma. For anything on this page, write to speech.rostrum@gmail.com.

If this changes

If what Rostrum keeps ever changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. There is no mailing list to tell you, because there are no email addresses.

The other half of the arrangement is on the terms page.