Here's the deal with your data.
Most voice assistants ship your voice off to a data centre and ask you to trust the privacy policy. Ari mostly doesn't need to — the hard work happens right on your device. And on the rare occasion something does use the internet, Ari tells you. No small print, no surprises.
What happens on your device
Quite a lot, actually. When you say “Hey Ari”, the wake word is spotted on the phone. Your speech is turned into text on the phone. Working out what you actually meant? Phone. There's even a small language model on board for the open-ended questions, so Ari can answer plenty with no signal at all. None of that needs the internet to work.
What leaves your device — and only when you say so
Here's the honest bit. A few things do use the network, but always because you asked them to:
- Cloud assistants. Plug in ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for the big questions and your question goes to that provider, with your own API key. Entirely optional.
- Skills with a job to do. Asking for the weather or turning off the lights means talking to a weather service or your smart home. That's rather the point of them.
- Every skill is labelled. In the skills browser, each one is marked on-device or uses-network — so you know before you install, not after.
No account. No telemetry. No kidding.
There's nothing to sign up for — no profile, no login for the core assistant. And there's no analytics quietly counting your taps, no crash-reporter phoning home, no “anonymous usage data”. We checked: there isn't an analytics SDK anywhere in the app, because we never put one there.
Open all the way down
You don't have to believe a word of this. The engine, the apps, and the signed skills registry are all out in the open — read the code, poke at it, or fork the whole thing.
We signed the Friendly Manifesto
A plain-language promise to build honest, secure, respectful software that doesn't exploit the people using it. That's the whole idea behind Ari, so signing up was easy.
