Linguago

Offline voice translation

Privacy Policy

Last updated 9 September 2026

Linguago translates speech using a model that runs on your device. Your voice and your translations stay on your phone.

What we collect

Nothing. There is no account to create, no server to send data to, and no analytics, crash reporting, or advertising in the app.

We cannot see your recordings, your translations, or how you use the app, because none of it is transmitted anywhere.

Your voice

When you tap the microphone:

Audio is recorded to a temporary file in the app's private storage.
That file is read once and passed to the translation model on your device.
The file is deleted immediately after it has been read.

The recording is never uploaded, never backed up by the app, and never reused. If the app closes mid-recording, the partial file is discarded.

Translation happens entirely on your phone using Google's Gemma model. The audio does not reach Google, us, or anyone else.

The one time the network is used

The translation model is about 2.6 GB and cannot be bundled inside the app, so it is downloaded once when you first set the app up.

That download connects to huggingface.co, where Google publishes the model. As with any download, Hugging Face and its CDN can see your IP address and that you requested the file. We receive nothing from this — the request goes directly from your phone to them.

After the model is present, the app makes no network requests at all and works with the radio switched off.

Speech playback

Worth reading, because it is the one exception. When you tap the speaker to hear a translation, Linguago hands the translated text to your device's own speech engine.

On iPhone and iPad, speech is synthesised on-device by Apple's system voices. Nothing is transmitted.
On Android, playback uses whichever text-to-speech engine your device is set to use. Most speak offline once a voice is installed, but some send text to their own servers. That behaviour belongs to the engine you have selected, not to Linguago, and we cannot control or observe it.

To keep everything local on Android, install offline voice data for your language under Settings → General management → Text-to-speech, or turn off Auto-play translated speech in Linguago's settings so nothing is spoken unless you ask.

We flag this because it is the only path by which translated text could leave your device, and it would be dishonest to describe the app as fully offline without saying so.

What is stored on your device

Small settings, saved locally and never transmitted:

Whether you have seen the welcome screen
Your chosen source and target languages
Which languages you have used recently
Whether translated speech plays automatically
The downloaded translation model

No transcriptions or translations are saved. Text disappears when you close the screen or start a new translation. There is no history feature. Deleting the app removes everything, including the model.

Permissions

Permission	Why
Microphone	To hear the phrase you want translated. Used only while you are recording.
Internet	Only for the one-time model download described above.

Children

Linguago has no accounts, no social features, no advertising, and collects no data, so there is nothing to gather from a child or anyone else.

Changes

This policy is versioned alongside the source code, so any change can be inspected in the repository's history.

Contact

Questions or concerns: open an issue on GitHub.