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AI Disclaimer

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What Bao actually does

FinTracker uses AI in four places:

  • Voice transcription — turning spoken transactions into text, entirely on your device.
  • Transaction parsing — turning text like "5 quid coffee Pret yesterday" into a structured amount, category, merchant, and date.
  • Bao chat — answering natural-language questions about your money ("how much did I spend on groceries last month?").
  • Weekly insights — pattern detection across your spending and savings, written up as a short narrative.

Who powers the AI

OpenAI is our AI provider today. The transcribed text of your voice entries, your chat messages, and the compact summaries described below are processed by OpenAI’s API — your audio never is, because transcription happens on your iPhone. Requests are relayed through our own server in Frankfurt (EU). Under OpenAI’s API terms, the default is that your inputs are not used to train OpenAI’s models. OpenAI may retain API content for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring before deleting it.

If we change AI providers or add new ones, we’ll update this page before the change ships and notify waitlist and app users.

Blog narrations use the open-source Kokoro-82M text-to-speech model (Apache 2.0). The audio you hear was rendered on a laptop, not from a live AI service — no part of you or your data is involved in producing the recording.

What gets sent, and what doesn’t

  • Voice transactions: speech-to-text runs entirely on your iPhone — the audio never leaves your device. Only the transcribed text of your short spoken sentence is sent (via our EU server) to OpenAI to be parsed into an amount, category, merchant, and date.
  • Bao chat: the app builds a compact summary on your device — category totals, budgets, goals, and streak, never your full transaction history and never your notes — and sends that summary along with your question. Bao’s replies are stored on your device only; we keep no server-side copy of your conversations.
  • Weekly insights: generated once a week from the same on-device summary and cached on your device. We send patterns ("£X on groceries this week, up Y% vs last week"), not your raw transactions.
  • Never sent: bank login passwords or other credentials, account numbers, your contacts, your photos beyond explicitly attached receipts, or your location. Any future opt-in bank integration would use industry-standard OAuth flows so we never see your bank password.
  • Apple Pay transactions (when this feature ships): if you enable the planned Apple Pay tracking via Apple Shortcuts, the transaction details (amount, merchant, date) are sent to OpenAI for category prediction — same as voice transactions — and then stored only on your device. No Apple Pay transaction data is retained by OpenAI or by Bao Labs LLC.
  • Fair-use counters: to enforce usage limits (like the 3 free Bao chat messages per month), our server keeps an anonymous count of your voice, chat, and insight calls, tied to a random device identifier — never to your name or email. See the Privacy Policy.

What AI is good at, and where it gets things wrong

AI is useful for:

  • Extracting structured data from your messy spoken or typed input.
  • Surfacing patterns you might miss in your own spending.
  • Answering questions in plain language.

AI can and does:

  • Make mistakes — wrong amounts, wrong categories, wrong dates.
  • Hallucinate — invent details or claim certainty about things it doesn’t know.
  • Misinterpret context — especially currency, slang, or shorthand.

Always verify amounts before saving a transaction. Always sanity-check Bao’s answers against your actual records. Bao is a helper, not an authority.

Bao is not a financial advisor

Bao’s suggestions, insights, and chat answers are informational only — not professional advice. We do not assess your suitability for financial products, your tax situation, or your investment risk profile.

For regulated advice — pensions, investments, mortgages, tax planning — please speak with a qualified, regulated advisor in your jurisdiction.

You’re in control

Here is what you control — and what never runs without you:

  • Voice logging runs only when you tap the mic. There is no background listening — nothing is recorded, transcribed, or sent unless you start a voice entry yourself.
  • Bao chat runs only when you open it and send a message. Each message is its own choice — nothing flows to the AI between messages.
  • The weekly insight is the one AI feature that runs unprompted — once a week, it sends the compact on-device summary described above. Turn it off in Settings → Privacy & data → AI features: with the toggle off, no new insight is generated and nothing is sent for it. An insight generated earlier may stay visible on your device.
  • Use FinTracker fully offline — manual tracking, budgets, goals, and streaks never need the internet. Voice parsing, Bao chat, and weekly insights are the only features that go online, and each one is optional.

In short: voice and chat send nothing unless you start them yourself, and the weekly insight — the one feature that acts on its own — has an off switch that stops all new generation.

Data minimization

  • We send the least data needed to complete each AI task.
  • Voice audio never leaves your device — transcription happens on your iPhone.
  • Chat summaries are generated on-device so we never send your full transaction history.
  • Neither we nor our processors use your data to train AI models.

Future changes

If we add a new AI capability — say, automatic budget recommendations or a new AI provider — we will update this page and announce the change before it goes live. Material changes that affect what data leaves your device will require your opt-in.

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