Official documents:
Terms of service | Privacy Policy
Your conversation privacy is essential to the trust you have in using Ava, and this is why we go above what's been done in the industry to respect it.
First, we use your voice and conversation data to train Ava. This is how artificial intelligence learns to:
Distinguish your voice (or your peers) from others to more easily understand who is talking in any conversation.
More accurately transcribe what you (or your peers) say in conversations.
What are our economic incentives as a social enterprise?
Ava's economic model is to deliver an accessibility service, which is cross-subsidized: organizations, and heavy users pay a monthly subscription fee for Ava plans. Part of this revenue covers their usage of Ava and additional premium features, and the rest enables us to fund free captioning hours for other Ava users.
There is no other revenue source, and as a result, Ava's economic model is completely independent from advertisements or selling your data to third parties. We have no interest in selling your data, or allow any 3rd party to access it, and we intend to keep it this way as part of our vision for a sustainable economic model to affordable & total accessibility.
Your conversation data is secure, anonymized and fragmented: we remember how people sound, not what they said.
We use enterprise-grade storage of your data (AWS), and encrypted end-to-end protocols to broadcast the audio. As a result, we pass security tests of top Fortune 500 companies, including financial institutions, healthcare institutions, and many more industries.
When an Ava conversation happens, the audio is fragmented in "sounds", and we use these to learn how people sound when they speak. We don't capture or store what the conversation is about.
Because the conversation data is anonymized, no one can access it unless we have your written authorization.
To comply with HIPAA standards and regulations, we provide our clients with the option to disable any data storage, as well as any ability to save transcripts. This means that Ava keeps no trace of potential PHI or other confidential information. When working with healthcare providers in any capacity, we make sure to have a BAA in place to specify in more detail what this looks like.
If you choose not to save the conversation transcript, there is no way to access the transcript at a later time because it is not kept in Ava. If you choose to save the conversation notes, they are text-only (no audio recording), and cannot be used as legal evidence or proof of record because they can be easily modified.
Why isn't Ava data local?
Ava service is based on a powerful speech-to-text algorithm. In order to deliver the highest accuracy possible for your conversations, Ava needs a high computation power that smartphones cannot deliver. Hence, using Internet networks is more beneficial to deaf & hard-of-hearing inclusion.