The transparency page
How it reads.
And what it never does.
This page exists because "trust us" isn't a feature. Here is exactly what happens to your clip, which services see it, what the welfare gate checks, and how we test all of it before every release.
The journey of one clip
1. You film a clip of 3 to 20 seconds. The clip stays on your phone until you ask for a read.
2. The clip is uploaded to our backend (storage and database run on Supabase; the worker that coordinates the pipeline runs on Fly.io).
3. Google's Gemini model reads the clip. It returns a structured description of the body language it sees. Under Google's commercial API terms, your content is not used to train their models.
4. The welfare gate runs on that reading — before anything playful is allowed to happen. The gate's rules are below.
5a. If the read is calm, clear, and playful: a short voice line is written and sent to ElevenLabs to be synthesized. ElevenLabs receives only short text strings — never your video, never audio from your clip.
5b. In every other case: a voice line written in a gentler register, with a note attached — the gate decides the register, not whether your pet gets a line. If the reading included signs we want a professional to look at, you see a calm card with a concrete next step — call your vet, or find a veterinary behaviorist. It describes what was seen; it never names a condition.
6. The result is stored under your account — your clips, readings, and voiced videos — where you can inspect or delete them anytime from inside the app.
That is the complete list of services that touch your content. Each one is contractually bound not to train on it and not to use it for advertising. The same list, with links to each provider's privacy terms, is in section 4 of our Privacy Policy.
What the welfare gate checks
The gate asks three questions of every reading, in order:
Is the clip clear enough to read at all? If it is too short, too dark, too shaky, or the pet isn't really in frame, PawQuirks abstains. It tells you why and suggests how to get a better clip. It does not fill silence with invention.
Is there any sign a professional should see? Signs associated with pain, distress, or an emergency change the register and add a calm card with a concrete next step — call your vet, or find a veterinary behaviourist. The reading still arrives, and so does a voice line, written gently. PawQuirks is never playful about a pet that looks uncomfortable — and it never leaves you guessing by going quiet instead.
What does this moment sound like? Every clip we can read gets a voice line — either written for this clip, or chosen from lines we have written and checked in advance for moments like this one. The reading is what decides which moment it is, and how the line should sound.
A line can still be missing for practical reasons — a synthesis provider outage, a voice you have switched off, or a render that fails. That is a technical failure, and we say so; it is never a judgement we have made about your pet.
These rules are not a settings toggle. There is no way to turn the gate off — not for you, and not for us.
How it's tested
Before any update ships, the welfare logic is validated against a fixed welfare suite: a large set of situations covering emergency signs, subtle discomfort, unclear clips, and happy play. The suite checks three things — that emergency signs always escalate, that concerning readings arrive in the gentler register with their card attached, and that unclear clips end in an honest abstain instead of a guess.
The same rules are implemented in three places (our research prototype, our server, and the app itself) and all three are tested against the same suite, so they can't drift apart. A release that fails any scenario does not ship. It runs on every proposed change, not only before a release.
What it never does
It does not give health verdicts. PawQuirks reads body language. It is not a veterinary tool, and it cannot tell you whether your pet is healthy. It can be wrong. If something about your pet worries you, call your vet — don't wait on an app.
It does not pretend the voice is real. The voice line is AI-delivered — either written for your clip or chosen from lines we have written and checked in advance. The pet is one hundred percent real; the words are not.
It does not sell or advertise with your data. No ads, no data sales, no third-party analytics SDKs. The app is free, with no subscription and no in-app purchases in this version.
It does not keep what you delete. Deleting your account from inside the app (Home → gear icon → Settings → Account) removes your pets, clips, readings, voiced clips, and activity events from our servers. One exception, kept on purpose and described in the Privacy Policy: an anonymous, content-hashed cache of synthesized audio that is not tied to you and contains no personal information.
Questions this page didn't answer? Email hello@pawquirks.com — a real human reads it, and welfare concerns get a same-day reply.