KIOKAI
Effective date: 11 August 2026
Your memories can be deeply personal. We believe you should understand what happens to them when you use Kiokai.
Your stories are private by default. You decide if, when and with whom they are shared.
This Privacy Policy explains how KIOKAI Limited collects, uses, stores and shares personal information when you use the Kiokai mobile application, website and related services (the “Service”).
KIOKAI Limited (“Kiokai”, “we”, “us” or “our”) is the controller responsible for personal information processed through the Service where applicable data protection law treats us as the controller.
Our details are:
KIOKAI LimitedKiokai is a voice-first service that helps people capture, develop, organise and preserve personal memories and life stories.
When you choose to speak with Kiokai, the Service may:
Creating a story does not make it public.
Your audio recordings, transcripts, written stories, photographs and videos remain private within Kiokai unless you decide to share them.
You may choose to:
Kiokai does not automatically publish your stories on social media. Sharing is initiated by you.
There are limited circumstances in which authorised Kiokai personnel and our technology providers may access or process private content. These are explained below.
The information we collect depends on how you use Kiokai.
We may collect:
When you start a Kiokai conversation, we may record and store your voice.
Audio is processed to provide features such as transcription, conversational prompts and story creation.
We create text transcripts from your recordings.
Because people use Kiokai to talk about their lives, transcripts may contain personal information about:
We store the written stories created from your conversations.
Stories may contain any information that you decide to discuss with Kiokai.
You may choose to add photographs or videos to a story.
We process and store these files so that you can view them within Kiokai and, if you wish, share them with other people or through external services.
Photographs and videos may contain information about you or other identifiable people.
Stories naturally involve other people.
You may mention family members, friends, colleagues or other individuals when telling your story.
If you have a Kiokai conversation together with another person, their voice and personal information may also form part of the recording and transcript.
Where you provide another person’s personal information, you are responsible for doing so appropriately and obtaining any permission required by applicable law.
Kiokai does not currently support sharing content with other users or inviting others to access your account. We therefore do not process information relating to invited users, shared access, or any related relationship data.
We may collect technical information needed to operate, protect and understand the Service, including:
If you buy a Kiokai subscription through Apple’s App Store, Google Play or another payment provider, we may receive information such as:
Where payments are handled by an app marketplace or payment provider, we do not normally receive your complete payment-card details.
If you contact us for support or another reason, we may keep:
Where necessary to investigate your query, an authorised Kiokai team member may review relevant content from your account.
Life stories can contain highly personal information.
Kiokai does not require you to share any sensitive personal information.
You decide what you choose to tell us, and your stories remain personal to you.
We only access or use your content where you have given us your consent or where we are required to do so by law.
Where applicable law requires additional protection or explicit consent for certain types of information, we will comply with those requirements.
You may withdraw consent where processing is based on consent. Withdrawal does not affect processing that was lawful before consent was withdrawn, but it may mean that we can no longer provide functionality that requires the relevant information.
We do not use your voice for biometric identification unless we expressly introduce such a feature, explain it to you and obtain any permission required by law.
We use personal information to provide and operate Kiokai. This includes using information to:
Your private stories are not intended to be casually browsed by Kiokai personnel.
Authorised Kiokai team members may access relevant user content where reasonably necessary to:
Where necessary to understand or resolve a particular user question or technical problem, an authorised team member may review relevant audio recordings, transcripts or generated stories.
We do not listen to or review users’ private stories, recordings or transcripts for the general purpose of improving, evaluating or testing Kiokai.
Access to private user content is restricted to authorised personnel who need it for their work. We use access controls designed to limit such access and maintain records of access where appropriate.
Authorised team members with access to private user content are expected to treat that information confidentially.
We do not permit team members to access private stories simply out of curiosity.
Artificial intelligence and speech-processing technologies are important parts of Kiokai. Our current core providers include:
Relevant portions of your audio recording may therefore be sent to AssemblyAI for transcription.
Relevant transcripts, instructions, story content or related information may be sent to Google Gemini where necessary to provide Kiokai’s conversational and story-generation features.
We seek to limit information supplied to these providers to what is reasonably necessary to provide the relevant functionality.
We do not permit AssemblyAI, Google Gemini or our other third-party AI providers to use your audio recordings, transcripts, stories or other personal information to train their AI models.
Where required by applicable law or the platform through which you use Kiokai, we will tell you what information will be sent and obtain the required permission before sending personal information to a third-party provider.
By accepting this Privacy Policy and the Terms & Conditions, you are deemed to have been informed of and to have consented to the use of the providers and subprocessors described in these documents, including any material provider-specific retention or use of data.
We may analyse the technical performance of Kiokai to identify problems and improve the reliability and functionality of the Service.
We do not listen to, read or otherwise review users’ private stories, recordings or transcripts for the general purpose of improving or testing Kiokai.
Where you contact us about a specific problem, an authorised team member may review the relevant content where reasonably necessary to investigate or resolve that problem, as described in Section 7.
Kiokai does not use artificial intelligence to make decisions about you that have legal or similarly significant effects.
We do not use your private stories, recordings, transcripts, photographs or videos for purposes unrelated to providing, supporting and securing Kiokai unless we tell you clearly and obtain any permission required by law.
Unless separately disclosed to you and permitted by applicable law, Kiokai will not use private stories for advertising purposes.
Where the UK GDPR, EU GDPR or another law requiring a legal basis applies, our legal basis depends on why we use the information.
We process information where necessary to perform our contract with you, including to:
We rely on consent where appropriate or legally required. This may include:
You can withdraw consent at any time, although this may prevent us from providing functionality that depends on the relevant information.
Where permitted, we may process limited personal information for our legitimate interests in:
We consider the impact on users’ privacy before relying on legitimate interests.
Where information receives additional legal protection, such as special-category personal data, we also identify any additional condition required by applicable law.
We may process information where necessary to comply with applicable law, regulatory requirements, court orders or other binding legal obligations.
Depending on how you use Kiokai, personal information may be processed by or disclosed to the following categories of recipients.
You can access content held in your Kiokai account.
Authorised Kiokai personnel may access information for the limited purposes described in this Privacy Policy.
Our current core providers include AssemblyAI and Google Gemini, as described in Section 8. We may also use companies that provide:
These providers process information where necessary to provide their services to Kiokai.
We may disclose information where reasonably necessary to:
You control sharing.
You may choose to share a particular story with a family member, friend or another person by sending it via email. When you do so, the person you send it to will be able to access the information included in the content you have shared.
Sharing one story does not automatically make your other stories available.
Once a story has been shared externally, you may not be able to withdraw or delete it from the recipient’s possession, and Kiokai cannot control or remove copies made by others.
Please only share personal or sensitive content with people you trust.
Kiokai may allow you to share stories through third-party services such as Facebook, Instagram, messaging applications or other social and communication platforms.
You may choose to include photographs or videos attached to your story.
Kiokai does not automatically publish this content. You decide whether to share it.
When you initiate external sharing, the content you select may be passed to the relevant third-party service directly or through sharing functionality on your device.
The third party will then process the information according to its own privacy policy and terms.
Kiokai cannot control what happens to information after you choose to publish or share it outside Kiokai. For example, another user may:
If you do not choose to share a story externally, it remains private within Kiokai, subject to the limited processing described in this Privacy Policy.
Kiokai does not sell your private stories, recordings, transcripts, photographs or videos to advertisers.
We do not use the contents of your private stories to target advertising at you.
If our business model or practices materially change in the future, we will update this Privacy Policy and obtain consent where required before using information for a materially different purpose.
Kiokai is a UK company and may be available to users around the world.
Some of our service providers, including providers of artificial intelligence, speech processing, hosting and other technology, may process personal information in countries other than the country where you live.
Where applicable data protection law restricts international transfers of personal information, we use an appropriate legal mechanism or safeguard. Depending on the circumstances, this may include:
You may contact us for further information about safeguards relevant to your personal information.
Kiokai exists in part to preserve memories over long periods.
We therefore normally keep your account and the audio recordings, transcripts, stories, photographs and videos associated with it for as long as:
If you delete an individual item where this functionality is available, we will remove it from active systems in accordance with our deletion procedures, subject to limited retention where necessary for legal, security or technical backup purposes.
If you request deletion of your account, we will delete associated personal information unless we need to retain limited information for legal, accounting, security, fraud-prevention or dispute-resolution reasons.
Deleted information may remain temporarily in backups until those backups are overwritten in the ordinary course.
Where we are legally required to retain particular records for longer, we may do so for the required period.
Account deletion is currently a manual process.
To request deletion of your Kiokai account:
Requiring the request to come from your registered email address helps us verify that the request has been made by the account holder.
We may contact you if additional information is reasonably required to verify your identity or the deletion request.
Once your request has been verified, we will process the deletion of your account and associated personal information, subject to the limited retention described in Section 16.
We will respond to and process valid deletion requests within the period required by applicable law.
Deleting your Kiokai account may not automatically cancel a subscription managed independently through Apple, Google or another app marketplace. You may need to cancel that subscription separately through the relevant marketplace.
We take the security of personal memories seriously.
We use technical and organisational measures designed to protect personal information against accidental loss, unauthorised access, misuse, disclosure, alteration or destruction.
These measures are designed to reflect the nature of the information we process and the risks associated with operating the Service, and may include controls relating to access, transmission, infrastructure and operational security.
We regularly review our security practices as Kiokai develops.
No method of electronic transmission or storage can guarantee absolute security. If we experience a personal data breach, we will investigate it and notify affected users and relevant authorities where required by applicable law.
You can also help protect your information by:
If you believe your account or personal information may have been compromised, please contact us promptly.
Depending on where you live and the law that applies to you, you may have rights concerning your personal information. These may include the right to:
These rights are not absolute and may be subject to legal exceptions. We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request.
We will respond to valid privacy requests within the period required by applicable law.
To exercise a privacy right, contact: talkto@kiok.ai
If you are in the United Kingdom, you also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
If you live elsewhere, you may have the right to complain to the data protection or privacy regulator responsible for your jurisdiction.
We would appreciate the opportunity to address your concern directly first, although you do not have to contact us before approaching a regulator where applicable law gives you that right.
Kiokai may be offered internationally.
Privacy rights and requirements vary between countries and regions.
Where local privacy law applies to our processing of your personal information, we will comply with mandatory rights and obligations applicable to that processing.
Nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to remove privacy rights that applicable law says cannot be waived.
We may provide additional regional privacy notices where necessary.
Kiokai is currently intended for users aged 18 and over.
An adult user’s stories may nevertheless refer to children or contain photographs or videos involving children.
Users should carefully consider children’s privacy before recording or sharing information concerning them, particularly where the material is sensitive or is being shared publicly.
If you believe a child has created a Kiokai account or provided personal information contrary to this policy, please contact us.
We may send messages necessary to operate your account, such as:
Where we send optional marketing communications, we will provide the choices required by applicable law.
You can opt out of optional marketing communications, but you may continue to receive messages necessary to administer your account or provide the Service.
We may use analytics and diagnostic technologies to understand whether Kiokai is functioning properly and how features are used.
Depending on the tools we use, this may involve information such as:
We do not use analytics and diagnostic tools as a reason to listen to or review the contents of users’ private stories.
We will configure and use such technologies in accordance with applicable privacy requirements.
If Kiokai or KIOKAI Limited is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, restructuring, sale of assets or similar corporate transaction, personal information may form part of the information transferred or reviewed as part of that transaction.
Where this occurs, we will continue to protect personal information and provide notice where required by applicable law before information becomes subject to a materially different privacy policy.
We may update this Privacy Policy as Kiokai develops, our technology providers change or legal requirements change.
If we make material changes, we will provide appropriate notice through Kiokai, by email or through another suitable method where required.
The effective date at the top of this document shows when this version took effect.
For questions about privacy, requests concerning your personal information, or concerns about how Kiokai uses your information, contact: talkto@kiok.ai