Voice privacy for children

Temporary audio processing

• The pill holds only the last second or two of sound in memory, constantly overwriting it.
• When it hears a practice word, it scores that attempt as correct, error or unsure, and adds one to the day’s count.
• The audio is then gone. Saylo’s firmware is being written with no path that saves audio to storage.

Consumer use and research are separate

Improving Saylo’s accuracy needs labelled recordings of children’s speech. Those will come only from a separate research programme run with speech therapists, with its own consent form signed by parents. Necklaces sold to families will never feed it.

What the daily counts contain

Optionally, counts can also be split by practice word (“rabbit: 3 errors”) and by part of the day (morning, afternoon or evening). Saylo doesn’t keep a timestamped log of each attempt, because minute-by-minute events would reveal a child’s routine.

Where data would live

What Saylo is designed never to collect

• Audio recordings of the child or anyone nearby.
• Voiceprints, or any way of identifying people by their voice.
• Location.
• A timestamped log of every attempt.
• Advertising or third-party tracking in the kids’ app.

Parent controls

• Parental consent at setup, before Saylo collects anything about a child.
• Delete everything with one tap.
• Export the counts to share with your child’s therapist, or don’t.
• Pause listening at any time, and see when Saylo was paused.

Pausing

• Hold the recessed button for 2 seconds: one long buzz, and the green light goes out.
• Resuming takes a 3-second hold (three quick buzzes, and the green blink returns) or a tap in the parent app.
• An optional auto-resume after a time the parent picks means an accidental pause can’t silently lose a whole day.

People nearby

• On a necklace the wearer’s voice is much louder and closer than anyone else’s. Saylo is designed to ignore speech that isn’t loud and close.
• Other people’s speech can pass through the pill’s short memory loop, but it is never kept or sent anywhere.
• A visible green blink shows when Saylo is listening, and anyone can ask for it to be paused.

Physical safety design

• A breakaway clasp on the necklace.
• A recessed silicone button moulded into the shell, so there’s nothing small to bite off.
• A sealed shell aiming for IP67 water resistance.
• A charger with battery temperature monitoring and a safety timer.

These are design targets and will be tested before launch.

The waitlist

If you join the waitlist we keep your email address, whether you’re a parent or a speech therapist, and anything optional you add (a practice name, your interests, how you heard about Saylo, campaign tags from the link you followed, and the page you signed up from). We never ask for a child’s name, date of birth, diagnosis or recordings. We use it only to send your invite and Saylo news. It’s stored privately with our service providers: Vercel, which hosts the site, and a Google Sheet that only Saylo can open.

Open questions

Saylo is in development, and some legal questions still need a children’s-privacy lawyer before launch:

• How US federal children’s privacy law (COPPA) applies to the daily counts, which are still information about a child: Saylo plans verifiable parental consent at setup and a published retention policy.
• Whether all-party-consent recording laws in some states apply to speech that is processed in memory for a second and never stored.
• How school device rules apply in classrooms.
• What’s needed in the UK and EU, where even temporary processing counts.

This page explains Saylo’s design. It isn’t legal advice.

Questions