Sona ("Sona," "we," "us") helps children practice their speech sounds at home, alongside their speech therapy. We built Sona for kids, so protecting their privacy — and giving parents control — is central to how it works. This policy explains what we collect, why, and the choices you have.
Sona checks practice sounds on the phone. The mic listens during practice and optional voice-enabled games and books. Sona never uploads your child's recordings or uses a cloud service to check their speech.
The app may keep one clear practice try per child per day in the device's own storage so a grown-up can listen back. It stays on that device. A grown-up can choose to share a saved clip using the phone's share sheet; the selected app or recipient then handles that copy. Clearing the app's data removes the local clips.
Sona does not collect children's recordings for advertising, sell them, or use them to build advertising profiles.
If your child’s speech-language pathologist (SLP) gave you a link to Sona, opening it connects your family to that clinician. Sona’s free version — daily practice and free games — costs you nothing either way, and if that clinician’s caseload has Premium, your family gets every game through their link. Sharing your child’s practice with that clinician is a separate question, asked on its own: saying no costs you nothing, and it does not decide whether your family gets Premium through the link.
If you say yes, that one clinician’s dashboard shows: your child’s first name and age as you typed them, which sounds they are practicing, which days they practiced and how many tries each day, and a rough pass rate per sound. They can also send practice assignments and a short note to this app. Never any audio — this progress-sharing connection does not send recordings. Nothing about your child goes to any other clinician, and no clinician ever sees another family.
How to stop. Open the grown-ups’ area and choose “Stop sharing with your speech therapist”. Their dashboard forgets your child immediately: first name, age, practice history and assignments are deleted, not hidden, and their device is marked so later practice cannot rebuild the record. Your child’s own progress stays on your device, and the free version stays free. A clinician can also remove a child from their own caseload, which deletes the same information.
How long it is kept. Until one of you deletes it, or automatically about 150 days after the clinician’s caseload last received any practice — whichever comes first. (That timer is set on the caseload as a whole, so a child who stops practicing while classmates continue is kept until the caseload itself goes quiet. We are narrowing this to a per-child timer.)
What a clinician sees is practice, not an assessment. A “pass rate” means the phone judged that what it heard had the shape of the target sound — not that the whole word was produced correctly. The dashboard says so on every screen that shows one.
A message from the grown-ups’ area holds only what you choose to send: the topics you tap, what you write and whether you would recommend Sona. It also says whether it came from the iPhone app or the website. An email address is optional. We use that email only to reply to you; it is not added to our email list. The message is kept by our data store (Upstash) — we keep the newest 1,000 messages, and the whole inbox is deleted a year after the last one arrives — and the Sona team is notified in Slack. Please leave out your child’s name and other private details: nothing on that form asks for them.
We share limited information with trusted providers only so the service can function:
These providers may only use the information to perform their service for Sona.
If something goes wrong. If we confirm a breach affecting your information we will notify affected clinicians and parents without unreasonable delay, and within 72 hours of confirming it. Where a family reached Sona through a clinician we usually hold no parent email address (only one a parent gave us themselves), so notice to those families goes through their clinician.
We do not show advertising in Sona, and we do not allow behavioral/ad tracking of children. We never place analytics or advertising trackers on the children's practice screens — those screens talk only to our own servers, which may record anonymous usage counts (for example, that a practice session was completed, its sound and its duration) tied to a random device identifier, never to a name, email, voice, or recording. Limited, privacy-respecting analytics (PostHog, configured with session recording and autocapture disabled) run on adult-facing pages of our website and of the app — such as marketing, parent setup, and settings — to understand general usage under the same anonymous identifier. The Sona iOS app contains no advertising trackers, and no third-party analytics ever run on a child's practice screen.
Sona is directed to children and designed to be used under a parent's or guardian's supervision. We collect only the information needed to provide speech practice, and we treat children's information accordingly:
If you believe a child has provided us information without a parent's involvement, please contact us and we will delete it.
Your child’s practice history lives on your own device, and stays there until you delete the app or clear it in Settings — we hold no copy.
What we hold on a server is: a clinician’s account (email, name, clinic, their code) for as long as that account exists; the caseload information described above, deleted when a parent stops sharing, when the clinician removes the child or their account, or automatically about 150 days after that caseload last received practice; a pending invite, which deletes itself 30 days after it is created if the family never opens it; the messages sent to us from “Talk to us”, with any reply email — the newest 1,000, deleted a year after the last one arrives; and our own copy of each email address given to join our email list — with where it was given, whether it came from a parent or a clinician, and the ad or link that brought them, if any — until you ask us to remove it.
We use reasonable safeguards, including encrypted connections. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, but we work to protect your data.
We may update this policy as Sona evolves. We'll revise the "last updated" date above and, for material changes, provide a more prominent notice.
Questions, requests, or concerns about privacy:
Sona · privacy@speaksona.com ·
speaksona.com