How Ogmo handles your data.

How you sign in depends on your device:

• iPhone & iPad: Sign in with Apple.
• Mac: Sign in with Apple, Google, or an email address and password. The Mac app also offers an offline “Use Offline” guest mode that needs no account at all.

We use Firebase Authentication (Google) to manage your account. It stores a unique identifier — and, where your sign-in method provides one, your email — so we can recognize you. If you use Sign in with Apple and choose “Hide My Email,” Apple gives us a private relay address instead of your real one. If you sign in, the Mac app may also use your display name (for example, to highlight when someone says your name in a transcript and to help speech recognition spell it correctly).

Why: To create and maintain your account so your settings, remaining minutes, and any sessions you share are tied to you.

When you record a session, Ogmo captures audio to turn it into text:

• Microphone — your voice, on every device.
• System audio (Mac only) — if you choose a “System Audio” or “Microphone + System Audio” source, Ogmo captures the audio playing on your Mac (a call, video, or meeting) so it can caption it. This uses Apple's Core Audio process-tap API and only after you grant the “Audio Recording” permission. It is not screen recording — Ogmo never reads your screen.

In the default cloud mode (called “Ogmo Cloud” in the Mac app), live audio is streamed over an encrypted (TLS) connection directly from your device to Soniox, our speech-to-text provider, which returns the transcript. This audio does not pass through Ogmo's own servers. Soniox processes the audio to produce the transcript; how Soniox handles data is described in its own privacy policy (linked below). When a session starts, the app also sends Soniox recognition hints: any custom vocabulary terms you have added (Mac), a short list of built-in terms, and — if you are signed in on Mac — your display name.

• iPhone & iPad: no recording is kept — once the transcript comes back, the audio is gone.
• Mac: so you can replay a session in sync with its transcript, Ogmo saves a compressed recording of the session on your device. You can turn this off in Settings, and it is deleted when you delete the session or your account. It is not uploaded during normal live transcription (see the next paragraph for the exceptions).

Importing files and re-transcribing (Mac). Where these features are available in your version of the Mac app, you can import an audio or video file and re-transcribe a saved session for higher accuracy. If the cloud engine is selected, Ogmo uploads that session's compressed audio file (an AAC .m4a file; for a video, only the audio track is extracted on your Mac and the video itself never leaves it) to Soniox's asynchronous transcription service. Ogmo asks Soniox to delete the uploaded file and the transcription job as soon as the job finishes. Very long recordings are split into overlapping segments that are sent one after another. With an on-device engine selected, imported files and re-transcription are processed entirely on your Mac.

Offline mode (Mac). You can instead select an on-device transcription engine in Settings. Your audio is then processed entirely on your Mac and is never sent to Soniox. On-device engines need a one-time model download, and no account or network is needed to transcribe. Offline mode is limited to the languages the selected on-device engine supports (for example, the Parakeet and Nemotron engines are English-only), and on-device transcription does not label individual speakers. Offline mode only covers transcription: summaries, Chat, sharing, and purchases are separate features with their own data flows, described below.

Why: Real-time transcription needs a speech-recognition engine — Soniox in the cloud, or an on-device model when you choose offline.

Your transcripts, AI-generated summaries, and Chat conversations are stored on your device by default (in the app's local database). On Mac, Ogmo also writes a Markdown copy of each session to a local folder — a folder inside the app's storage by default, or a folder you choose in Settings. That folder stays on your Mac. When you delete a session in the app, Ogmo also removes that session's Markdown copy; if you delete your account, you may need to delete the export folder yourself.

Ogmo does not keep copies of your transcripts or summaries on its servers. The text does leave your device in these cases:

• Ogmo Cloud AI (iPhone, iPad, and Mac). When you generate a summary, ask a Chat question (Mac), or let Ogmo suggest speaker names from a summary (Mac), the transcript text — and for Chat, the conversation so far — is sent over an encrypted connection to an Ogmo Cloud Function hosted on Google Cloud (region asia-southeast1). That function forwards it to a third-party large-language-model provider through OpenRouter to generate the result. The specific model provider and model are set in our server configuration and may change without an app update. The text is processed to produce your answer; Ogmo does not store the request or the result on its servers, and the result is saved on your device. Retention by OpenRouter and the model provider it routes to is governed by their own policies.
• Apple Intelligence (Mac). You can choose Apple Intelligence for summaries and Chat in Settings. The on-device option keeps the text on your Mac. The Private Cloud Compute option sends the text to Apple, which processes it under Apple's Private Cloud Compute protections and policies (including any usage limits Apple applies). Depending on a setting that we can turn on remotely, the Mac app may instead choose automatically between on-device Apple Intelligence, Private Cloud Compute, and Ogmo Cloud, based on what is available on your Mac and how long the text is, and may fall back to Ogmo Cloud if an Apple option fails.
• Sharing. If you choose to share a session, its contents are uploaded as described in the next section.

Choosing an on-device transcription engine does not by itself stop these AI requests. To keep summaries and Chat on your Mac, select the on-device Apple Intelligence option for them, or do not generate them. Existing summaries and transcripts remain viewable offline.

Automatic speaker naming (Mac) uses the same summary request: names suggested from the conversation are saved on your device.

Why: So you can review what was said in a session after it ends, and get summaries and answers about it.

Ogmo lets you share a single session so someone else can follow it live or read it afterward — for example, a classmate viewing a lecture from the web. Sharing is off by default and is always your choice, decided per session at the moment you tap Share.

• When you share, that session — its transcript, speaker labels, summary, and basic session details such as its title and times — is uploaded to Google Firebase (Firestore) and made available at a public link on session.ogmo.app. Anyone with the link can view it. Audio is never part of a share.
• If you share while a session is still recording (iPhone, iPad, or Mac), new transcript lines are copied to the shared page as they arrive.
• You can set a password on a shared session to restrict who can open it. Setting or removing a password goes through an Ogmo Cloud Function.
• Only the session you share is uploaded. Sessions you do not share stay on your device.
• Removing a shared copy. Deleting your account deletes the shared copies of your sessions from our servers. On Mac, deleting a session in the app also removes its shared copy and revokes its link (this needs an internet connection; if you are offline at the time, removal may be delayed or incomplete, and the copy is removed when you delete your account). On iPhone and iPad, the app does not yet remove the shared copy when you delete a single session — until it does, email support@ogmo.app and we will remove it for you.

Why: To let you give others real-time or after-the-fact access to a session you choose to share. Once someone has opened a public link, we cannot control what they do with what they saw.

On iPhone and iPad, we use Google Firebase Analytics and Crashlytics to collect anonymized usage data and crash reports. The Mac app collects no analytics or crash telemetry. (The Mac app does read a small remote configuration document from Firebase that switches features on or off; it does not include any personal data.)

This includes things like: which features are used, how often sessions are started, and details about crashes (device type, operating-system version, and what the app was doing when it crashed).

• This data does not include your audio, transcripts, or summaries.
• It is anonymized and aggregated.
• It is used to improve the app and fix bugs.

You can turn analytics collection off at any time in the iPhone/iPad app's Settings. (That toggle controls analytics; crash reporting is separate.)

Why: We need to know when the app breaks and how people use it so we can make it better.

Extra transcription time is sold as one-time minute packs (in-app purchases) on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, handled entirely by Apple. iPhone and iPad may also offer monthly subscription plans that include hours. We do not see or store your payment information. Apple processes and manages all billing, including gift cards and promotional codes you redeem through Apple's own redemption flow.

We use RevenueCat to validate purchase receipts and track your remaining balance; it processes purchase receipts and device identifiers. Apple confirms a purchase to us so we can add the minutes to your account. Your minute balance is tied to your Ogmo account and is shared across the devices you sign in on.

Minutes are used by cloud transcription (live, and for imported or re-transcribed files). When a cloud session ends, the app tells an Ogmo Cloud Function your account identifier and the number of minutes used so the balance can be reduced.

Why: To add minutes to your account after a purchase and keep the balance accurate. (On Mac, offline mode uses no minutes.)

On Mac, the app's Settings include an optional marketing opt-in, which is off by default. If you turn it on, we store your consent so we can email you about Ogmo. You can opt out at any time by turning it back off. This consent is stored in your user record in Google Firebase.

Your email address comes from the sign-in method you already use — we do not ask for it separately.

Why: So we only contact you if you have asked us to.