1. Overview
Little Words is operated by Yes AI LLC, a Texas limited liability company doing business as Little Words (“we,” “us,” or “our”). Little Words is a parent-controlled speech, language, and communication practice app for children. This policy covers the Little Words iOS app and littlewords.ai.
A parent or legal guardian creates and controls the account. We require parental consent before enabling child voice features and design our practices around data minimization, purpose-limited retention, and the parental rights required by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA”).
Little Words is a home-practice support tool, not a medical provider, diagnostic service, or substitute for a speech-language pathologist. Please do not enter information that is not needed to personalize practice.
2. Information We Collect
Depending on the features a parent chooses, we collect or process:
Parent account information - Email address, authentication records, consent records, support requests, and subscription status.
Child profile information - A first name or nickname, age, interests, communication stage, parent-selected target sounds, sensory preferences, conditions or goals a parent chooses to provide, and parent notes.
Practice and progress information - Activities completed, practice attempts, streaks, milestones, automatic word-recognition matches, session summaries, and settings. Automatic recognition can be affected by a child’s speech, the microphone, or background noise and is not a clinical accuracy score.
Voice and conversation content - Microphone audio is transmitted for real-time speech recognition and conversation. Little Words does not save raw audio in its own database. Transcripts and derived summaries may be stored for the limited periods described below.
App operations data - Parent-account identifier, device/app version, screen and feature events, purchase events, crash reports, performance data, and push-notification tokens. We configure app analytics without session replay or advertising identifiers and strip child names, email addresses, and exact ages from analytics properties.
3. Information We Do NOT Collect
Little Words does not request or intentionally collect the following for child profiles:
- × Last names or full names
- × Photos, videos, or profile images
- × Precise location
- × Contact lists or address books
- × Social media accounts or handles
- × School names or educational records
4. How We Use Data
We use information only for the purposes described here:
Provide and personalize practice - Run voice conversations and games, use parent-selected goals and interests, save settings, and generate caregiver-facing summaries.
Operate the parent account - Authenticate the parent, record consent, manage purchases, provide support, send requested notifications, export data, and delete data.
Keep the service reliable and improve the product - Diagnose crashes, measure whether parent-facing flows work, prevent misuse, and evaluate aggregate product performance. Little Words does not use child conversations or raw voice audio to train its own general-purpose AI model.
No child-directed advertising - The app contains no third-party advertising. We do not sell child personal information or use it for targeted advertising.
5. Data Retention
We set retention periods by purpose and remove information when it is no longer reasonably necessary:
⏱️ Detailed conversations: up to 7 days
Child and Buddy message content and full session transcripts are assigned a seven-day expiration so recent sessions can be summarized and reviewed.
📋 Session records: generally up to 90 days
Session summaries, activity records, and related low-importance practice memory are cleaned on a rolling schedule, generally within 90 days. Aggregate progress and the child profile remain while the profile is active so the parent can see longer-term practice history.
🎙️ Raw microphone audio
Little Words does not save raw audio in its own database. Audio is transmitted to a speech/AI provider to service the live request; provider processing and any limited security retention are governed by the provider terms and service configuration.
👤 Parent-controlled deletion
Parents can delete a child profile or account and may contact us for review, export, or deletion. Soft-deleted child profiles are scheduled for permanent removal within the service’s 90-day retention window, subject to security, fraud-prevention, backup, and legal obligations.
6. Third-Party Services
We use service providers to operate features requested by the parent. They may process data only for the relevant service purpose and are expected to protect it consistently with applicable law and their agreements with us. Current provider categories include:
OpenAI - Real-time AI conversation, generated voice, and speech transcription for Buddy sessions.
Anthropic - Text-based conversation fallbacks, safety checks, session summaries, and practice-memory extraction.
Deepgram and ElevenLabs - Speech-to-text and text-to-speech for games or fallback voice flows.
Supabase, Railway, and Vercel - Parent authentication, database/backend hosting, and website hosting.
Apple, RevenueCat, and Stripe - App Store or web purchase processing and subscription status. Payment providers receive parent purchase information, not child conversation content.
PostHog and Sentry - Limited product analytics and error diagnostics. App analytics use a parent account identifier and sanitized event properties; app session replay is disabled. Sentry is used only when error monitoring is enabled for a release.
Expo - Delivery of parent-enabled push notifications and app update services.
The public website (littlewords.ai) uses Meta Pixel, Google Analytics, and PostHog web analytics for adult visitors, for audience measurement and to understand which pages lead parents to try the app. Those website tools are separate from child sessions and do not receive child profiles or child conversation content. You can block non-essential cookies in your browser or contact us with a privacy choice request.
7. Parental Rights
Under COPPA, parents and legal guardians have specific rights regarding their child’s personal information:
Review Your Child’s Data - Request a complete summary of all personal information collected from your child.
Download a Data Export - Use the in-app export or request a portable copy of account and child information.
Delete Child or Account Data - Use the in-app controls or request permanent deletion, subject to the limited exceptions described above.
Revoke Consent - Withdraw consent at any time. We will stop collection that depends on consent and process deletion subject to the limited retention and legal exceptions described above.
To exercise any of these rights, contact us at support@littlewords.ai. We will verify your identity as the child’s parent or legal guardian before processing any request.
8. Data Security
We use administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards appropriate to the information and service, including:
Encryption in transit - App and service communications use HTTPS/TLS.
Managed storage protections - Production data is hosted with access controls and encryption capabilities provided by our infrastructure vendors.
Access controls and minimization - Access is limited to people and systems that need it to operate or support the service, and analytics payloads are sanitized.
Monitoring and response - We use operational logging, error monitoring when enabled, dependency updates, and incident-response procedures. No service can guarantee absolute security.
9. Contact Us
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or our data practices:
We aim to acknowledge privacy inquiries promptly and complete verified access, export, consent, and deletion requests within the period required by applicable law.