The short version. Your recordings, transcripts, and everything said in your room stay on your machine. Your maneku account syncs presets and session stats, never content. On a bring-your-own-key plan, AI traffic goes straight from your computer to your providers with your keys. It does not pass through maneku's servers.
What never leaves your machine Local
Everything below is written to a folder on your own disk (inside the app's data directory) and has no upload path in the app. That's not a policy promise, it's how the software is built: there is no code that sends these anywhere.
- Transcripts. The full speaker-labeled transcript of every session lives in a plain text file you can open yourself.
- Audio. Room audio is transcribed in short chunks and never stored as recordings by maneku at all.
- Summon text. What the co-host said, and what it was responding to.
- Episode notes and reference materials. Your prep content stays in the session files on disk.
- Your API keys. Stored on your device encrypted at rest, sealed with a key held in your macOS Keychain. They are never sent to maneku's servers.
- Usage metrics. The app keeps per-session stats files (tokens, character counts, latency, cost) so you can see what a show cost. These are local files. maneku has no analytics service, no crash reporter, and no tracking SDK in the app.
Want to check? Every session folder contains human-readable files: transcript.txt, session.json, and small CSV files of usage numbers. Open them. What you see is everything there is.
What syncs to your maneku account Cloud
Signing in is what makes your setup follow you across devices and lets us check your plan. Here is the complete list of what our servers store for you:
| Data | What exactly |
|---|---|
| Account | Your email address and sign-in method. |
| Personas | Name, description, voice and model choice, and personality sliders for each persona you create. |
| Shows | Show name, default persona, and any standing show text you save (like a pre-show brief or a custom prompt). |
| Settings | Four preferences: voice provider, two budget alert numbers, and your summon hotkey. |
| Session stats | When a session started and ended, how many summons, interrupts, chats, and greetings happened, estimated cost, and which show and persona ran. Numbers and names only. |
Not on that list, and not stored by our servers: transcripts, audio, summon content, episode notes, reference materials, API keys. Nothing derived from your transcript syncs either.
The app's other network traffic
- Sign-in and plan checks. On launch and periodically while open, the app confirms who you are and that your plan is active. This carries your account identity, never room content.
- Key checks. When you save a provider key, the app pings that provider to confirm the key works. No content is sent.
- Voice catalog and reference ingest. Fetching the voice list from maneku.ai, or pulling in an article or video you explicitly added as reference material.
That's the whole list. If the app is closed, nothing runs and nothing is sent.
What the AI providers see
On a bring-your-own-key plan, your machine talks directly to three providers using your own accounts. maneku is not in that path. What each one receives, and what they say they do with it:
Anthropic (the co-host's brain)
Receives the recent conversation transcript plus your persona and show context, and returns the co-host's response. Anthropic states it does not train on API data by default and automatically deletes API inputs and outputs within 30 days (longer only for abuse-flagged content). Sources: training policy, retention policy.
Groq (transcription)
Receives short chunks of room audio and returns text. Groq states it does not retain inference data by default (up to 30 days only for reliability and abuse monitoring, which you can switch off entirely with the Zero Data Retention setting in your Groq console), and its services agreement prohibits training on your data. Sources: data practices, services agreement.
ElevenLabs (the voice, optional)
Receives the co-host's response text and returns audio. This is the one to configure: by default ElevenLabs keeps your generations in your account history until you delete them and may use submitted content to improve its models unless you opt out. The opt-out lives in your ElevenLabs account under Terms and Privacy → Data use. We recommend flipping it. Sources: privacy policy, retention docs.
On a credit plan it works differently. Credit-plan summons route through maneku's server, because that's where credits are counted and the provider keys live. On that path your summon content passes through our infrastructure, in memory, on its way to the providers. It is relayed immediately and never written to disk, logs, or the database — the audit covered this path too, and the relay code records usage counts only. Bring-your-own-key traffic never touches our servers at all.
How we know this is true
This page was written from a code-level audit of the shipping build, not from intentions. We enumerated every network call in the app and every file it writes. Where we found daylight between our claims and the code, we changed the code: as of this build, session sync sends numbers and names only, with nothing derived from your transcript.
Last verified against the shipping build on July 22, 2026. Found something that doesn't match? Tell us: hello@maneku.ai. We'd genuinely like to know.