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.
Sona does not save recordings. Each try is checked in the moment and then discarded; nothing is kept on the device or anywhere else. (Earlier versions kept one practice try per child per day on the phone for a grown-up to play back; the app deletes any such clip the next time it opens.)
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 practice history 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 and by an email to our own inbox, sent by our email provider (Resend). Please leave out your child’s name and other private details: nothing on that form asks for them.
Sona may offer a monthly Practice Board. It is off for every child unless a grown-up turns it on in Settings and confirms by tapping a link we email to them; it stays off on phones set up through a speech therapist or a school. To send that email we give the address to our email provider (Resend); Sona keeps no copy of it, only a scrambled form for one day so the same address isn’t sent repeat emails. If it is on, Sona’s server keeps, for each child: a random board number, a nickname Sona makes up (like “Brave Fox 42”), the buddy picture’s name, the time zone setting, the date it was turned on, and which days this month the child met their daily goal. Anyone who turns the board on can see the top ten places, with nicknames, buddy pictures and day counts that update once a day; nobody sees a child’s name, age, photo, voice or sounds, and speech therapists never see the board. Month lists are erased about a week after each month ends; an entry is deleted after 100 days without a counted day, and at once when a grown-up turns it off, removes the child, or uses the remove link in the confirmation email. To stop abuse, Sona’s server keeps a scrambled form of the internet address a board request came from, for up to an hour, never with the board entry.
When you set up Sona, or later in Settings, you can give your email to get a weekly progress report. Only then does your phone send Sona’s server, as setup ends (or as you turn it on) and then every half hour or so while your child practices, a few numbers for each child on that phone, for this week and last: how many days they said their sound out loud, how many days they reached the daily goal, how many days a week you planned (if you picked them), how many reps they did (and how many of those were in practice rather than games and books), and which sounds those reps were in, with your email address, a random number for the phone and a random number for each child. Never a name, an age, a word, a voice or how well a sound matched. Nothing is kept until you tap the confirm link we email you, so a mistyped address never gets a report; until then the phone keeps checking, after two weeks once a day, and after eight weeks only once a month, with no numbers. We send an address at most five confirm links in a six-month window that starts with the first, and keep a scrambled form of it that long to count them. We keep those numbers until three weeks after the week they count and use them only to email you the report on Mondays; the email says “Child 1”, never a name. To remember that you confirmed, we keep a scrambled form of your address with the phone’s random number, until 120 days after a phone of that address last sent. Unsubscribe from it and nothing more is kept or emailed. A phone you confirmed stops sending its numbers, and once a month checks, with no numbers, whether the address is back on the list; a phone you never confirmed keeps checking as above, and Sona keeps nothing it sends. Turn it off in Settings and that phone sends nothing more: Sona deletes its numbers (under any spelling of the address) and adds a note that the report is off on that phone (its random number, under the scrambled address), so nothing it sent before and no old confirm link can start it again; that it was confirmed is kept as above. The note is kept up to 400 days, and for as long as another phone of that address keeps sending.
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. Our server passes those counts on to PostHog under the same random identifier: for example, that a practice session was completed, that a chest or a Trophy Road gift was opened, or that a game level was played. While a free trial is on, our server also keeps, under that identifier, which days of the trial had any practice (yes or no for each day, nothing more) and how the trial ended, so we can see whether families get to try Sona before deciding; it keeps that for 120 days. Limited, privacy-respecting analytics (PostHog, with autocapture turned off) 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. On four of those screens only — speaksona.com’s home page, speaksona.com/try, parent setup up to the moment the phone is handed to the child, and the plan screen when a grown-up opens it from setup or after a first practice run — PostHog may also make a session recording: a replay of how the page looked and where it was tapped or scrolled, so we can see where those screens are confusing. Where those screens show your child’s name, the recording shows a placeholder instead; any part of a recording that would still hold a child’s name or a grown-up’s email address Sona knows is not sent at all; and every box you type in is recorded as an empty shape, with nothing you typed. The setup question about speech therapy, and the “practice is ready” screen that repeats your answer, are never in a recording. A session recording never includes a child’s practice, games or books, Settings, sound or voice. 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, except, for a child a grown-up put on the Practice Board, which days this month met the daily goal, and, for a household that asked for the weekly progress report and confirmed it, its few numbers a week, for three weeks.
What we hold on a server is: a clinician’s account (email, name, clinic, their code and their clinician role and work setting if provided) 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; 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, the ad or link that brought them, if any, and whether a parent started Sona Premium in the app — until you ask us to remove it; for a parent who gave the app their email, what RevenueCat last told us about their Premium, until you ask us to remove it, and which random RevenueCat identifier that email came with (and when Premium last moved away from that identifier), for 400 days after RevenueCat last mentioned it; a Practice Board entry, only if a grown-up turned it on, for as long as described above; and the weekly progress report’s numbers, with the address it goes to, for three weeks (and a scrambled form of that address, to remember it confirmed, for 120 days after a phone of that address last sent, and, if the report was turned off on a phone, a note of that, the phone’s random number under that scrambled address, for up to 400 days, longer while another phone of that address keeps sending). To stop abuse, our server also keeps the internet address a request came from, for up to an hour, to count requests (for the Practice Board, only a scrambled form of 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