Privacy

What stays on your Mac

• Your decks, review history and progress, in ~/Library/Application Support/Earkeys.
• Settings such as voice, speed and mode, in the app's preferences.
• The Kokoro voice model, once you download it.

Nothing here is uploaded. Delete that folder to erase your practice history.

Microphone and speech recognition

Earkeys asks for the microphone only when you use Shadowing. Your speech is turned into text by macOS on your Mac; Earkeys requires on-device recognition and never sends audio anywhere. Your latest try is kept in a temporary file so ⌘P can play it back, and the next try replaces it.

When Earkeys uses the internet

• Kokoro voices. If you choose Kokoro, Earkeys downloads the voice model (about 250 MB) from Hugging Face once. Hugging Face sees an ordinary download request.
• Getting the app. Downloads are served by GitHub from the earkeys-releases repository.

Apart from that, Earkeys works offline. It does not check for updates or report crashes.

AI agents

Earkeys includes earkeys-mcp, a local server that AI agents start on your Mac. It only runs when you connect an agent from Connect AI Agents. When you ask that agent about your decks, mistakes or progress, what it reads is sent to the agent's provider, under that provider's own privacy terms. Earkeys itself sends nothing.

This website

This site has no cookies and no analytics. It loads its fonts from Google Fonts. The demo plays recordings made with Earkeys' Kokoro voice, and what you type in it stays in the page.

Questions

Open an issue at github.com/vanchonlee/earkeys-releases. If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it.