Effective 5 July 2026
Akiva & Friends is built to be private by design. Everything runs on hardware we own and operate — no third-party AI services and no cloud inference. The one third-party tag we load is privacy-respecting Google Analytics, for anonymous, aggregate usage only (see Analytics & cookies). This page explains exactly what the microphone and camera do, and what (little) data touches your device.
When you choose to speak, your browser captures audio so your words can be turned into text (speech recognition) and answered. Speech is transcribed either in your browser or on our own local GPUs; audio is used only to produce the response in the moment and is not recorded or retained as an audio file. You can use the app entirely by typing instead — the microphone is only active when you enable it.
The camera is off by default and only turns on if you explicitly enable it. When enabled, a small vision model running on our local hardware perceives the live frame so a sage can warmly react to your presence and expression. As the on-screen notice states: frames are seen transiently on local hardware and are never uploaded, recorded, or stored. Turning the camera off ends this immediately.
The language models, source retrieval, voice synthesis (NVIDIA ACE / Audio2Face), and vision all run on infrastructure we own and control. We do not send your questions, audio, or video to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or any other external AI or cloud API.
To understand how the site is used — which pages are visited and how people move through them — we use Google Analytics 4, loaded through Google Tag Manager. This is the only third-party tag on the site, and it measures anonymous, aggregate activity (for example: a chat turn happened, a sage was selected, a page was viewed, and the general source that brought you here). We do not use it for advertising, ad-targeting, or cross-site profiling, and your questions, audio, and video are never sent to it. Google Analytics may set its own cookies for this measurement; you can block them with your browser or an extension without affecting the app. Google's handling of this data is governed by the Google Privacy Policy.
Like any website, our servers may record basic, transient technical information (such as an IP address and request time) needed to deliver the page securely and keep the service running. This is not used to build a profile of you and is not shared for advertising.
The service is intended for a general audience studying Torah and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.
If this policy changes, we will update the effective date above. Material changes will be reflected on this page.
Questions about privacy? Reach us at [email protected].