There's a moment in almost every voice app where you have to just trust the company. You talk, your voice goes somewhere, and you hope whoever's on the other end of that pipe is telling the truth about what happens to it next.
We didn't want Aplume to ask you for that kind of trust. So we built it so you don't have to give it.
Here's what actually happens when you tap the microphone in Aplume.
Your voice never leaves your phone.
When you speak into Aplume, your phone converts your voice into text using its own on-device processing — the same kind of technology your phone already uses for things like dictation in Messages. That conversion happens locally, on your device, not on a server somewhere.
The moment your words become text, the audio itself — the actual sound of your voice — is thrown away. Not stored in a folder. Not backed up "just in case." Gone, immediately, the instant it's no longer needed.
That means there's no audio file of you sitting on a server anywhere. Nothing for a data breach to expose. Nothing for anyone at our company to accidentally listen to. Nothing to subpoena, nothing to leak, nothing to worry about.
So what does leave your phone?
Just the text — and only if you choose "Organize" instead of "Save as written." If you organize an entry, the plain text of what you said gets sent to a processing service that structures it into a cleaner format. That service is bound by a strict agreement: it processes your text once, to do its one job, and then it's required to forget it. Not stored for later. Not reviewed by a person. Not used to improve any model, anyone's model, ever.
If you choose "Save as written" instead, nothing gets sent anywhere at all — your words are saved exactly as you typed or spoke them, straight into your private vault.
Why we cared enough to build it this way
Honestly, it would have been easier not to. Storing raw audio is the default for most voice apps — easier to build, easier to debug when something goes wrong, easier to improve down the line. We went the harder route on purpose.
A journal is supposed to be the one place where you don't perform for anyone. The moment you're not sure whether that's true — whether somewhere, somehow, someone might hear the version of you that only exists at 11pm when you're finally being honest — the whole thing stops working. You start editing yourself. You start writing the version you'd be okay with a stranger reading.
We wanted Aplume to be a place where that editing instinct never has to kick in. So we built the plumbing to match the promise, instead of asking you to just believe it.
