Praesto app Recording and Transcription Notice

Who can use Praesto

Praesto is available only to users who are 18 years of age or older and who are physically located in the United States, excluding the State of Illinois. If you are under 18, or if you are located in Illinois or outside the United States, you may not use Praesto. See Terms of Use § 2 for the full eligibility rules.

What Praesto records

Praesto can capture audio from two sources on the device you sign in from:

Your microphone, when you tap a record button or start a session, so that anything you (or others around you) say can be transcribed.
Your device's system audio, on supported platforms (currently macOS). This captures the audio playing through your device's speakers or output, including the voices of other people on a videoconference, webinar, or phone call.

Speech recognition runs on your device, and the raw audio never leaves the device. On iPhone, iPad and Mac, it uses the operating system's built-in speech framework. In no case does Praesto's own server receive your audio. We store the resulting transcript in your Praesto account so you can search, study, and synchronize it across your devices. One important exception: if you record into a group conversation, the transcript, and any content you designate for the group, is also visible to the other members of that group, not only to you. See "Group conversations" below.

Your responsibility, in plain English

If you are alone (recording your own thoughts, a personal voice memo, or your own side of a call) recording is your business and laws on recording usually do not apply. The moment another person's voice is captured, the rules change. Recording other people without the consent they are entitled to under the law is illegal in many places. You are the person making the recording, and you are the person responsible for following those laws. Praesto provides the tool; you provide the consent.

The U.S. recording landscape, in 90 seconds

Federal law and most U.S. states allow recording a conversation as long as at least one party to the conversation consents. (If you are participating in the conversation yourself, that "one party" is you.)

The following U.S. jurisdictions generally require the consent of every participant in the conversation, not just one:

California
Connecticut (in some circumstances)
Florida
Illinois (note: the Praesto Service is not available to users located in Illinois; see Terms of Use § 2.3. If anyone else on your conversation is located in Illinois, Illinois all-party-consent law may still apply to your recording even though you are located elsewhere.)
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan (in some circumstances; the law is unsettled)
Montana
Nevada (in some circumstances)
New Hampshire
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Washington

A few practical rules of thumb:

When in doubt, ask. Get consent on the record at the start: "Just so everyone knows, I'm recording this for my own notes. Is everyone okay with that?" Save the answer.
The strictest law wins. If you live in a one-party state but you are on a Zoom call with someone in California, you should treat the call as if California law applies.
System audio = remote participants. Recording the audio playing through your laptop's speakers records the people on the other end. Get their consent before you press record.
Public spaces are not always safe. A crowded coffee shop is not a "private conversation," but a quiet table where you would not be overheard usually is. Don't rely on the room being loud.
Calls across state lines. If any participant is in an all-party-consent state, get everyone's consent.

⚠️ Special warning about videoconferences and phone calls. When you record system audio during a videoconference, phone call, or webinar, the people on the other end usually have no way to know you are recording. They will not see your built-in Zoom/Teams/Meet recording indicator, because Praesto records the audio output of your device, not through the conferencing platform. You must affirmatively tell them and get their consent before you start recording. Compliance the conferencing platform might impose on its own native recording feature does not extend to recordings you make with Praesto. If anyone on the call is located in California, Illinois, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington, or another all-party-consent jurisdiction, you must get their consent regardless of where you are sitting.

Lectures, classrooms, and meetings

Most schools, universities, and employers have specific rules about recording. Common requirements:

Tell the instructor before class begins, and get permission.
Tell the other students if their voices may be captured.
Use the recording only for your own study and don't redistribute it.
For workplace meetings, follow your employer's policy and don't record performance discussions, HR conversations, or anything covered by a confidentiality obligation without explicit approval.

Some institutions have explicit bans on student recording. Some require accommodations (for example, for students with disabilities). When in doubt, ask first.

Things you must not record with Praesto

You may not use Praesto to capture or process:

Protected health information regulated by HIPAA (medical visits, therapy sessions, anything you would not want in a HIPAA-covered system).
Government-classified information.
Communications subject to attorney–client privilege that belong to someone else.
Anyone in a place where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy (restrooms, locker rooms, bedrooms, examination rooms).
Minors (anyone under 18). Because the Praesto Service is restricted to users 18 and older (Terms of Use § 2.1), you should not be using Praesto to record minors at all. If a minor's voice is incidentally captured (for example, in the background of a public space), you remain responsible for complying with any laws that apply to recording minors, including the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and state laws on filming minors.
Conversations you would otherwise be barred from recording by contract, NDA, professional ethics rules, or court order.

How to obtain consent (a short script)

You can copy and use this verbatim at the start of any recording:

"I'm using an app called Praesto to record this conversation so I can study from a transcript later. The recording becomes a written transcript that an AI assistant helps me study from. Is everyone okay with me recording?"

That script is accurate for a personal recording. If you are recording into a group conversation, it is not enough: the transcript will be visible to the other members of the group, and you must say so. For example:

"The transcript will be shared with my study group in the app."

If anyone declines, stop the recording. If you have already recorded part of the conversation, delete that recording and any transcripts generated from it before continuing.

Group conversations

Praesto lets a study group learn together in a shared group conversation. If you use one, a few extra things are true:

Joining a group records your acknowledgment. When you join a group conversation, Praesto records, at the time you join, your acknowledgment of the recording-consent obligations described in this notice.
Group content is visible to the group. Transcripts you record into a group conversation, and content you designate for the group, are visible to the other members of that group, not only in your personal account.
Your quiz answers are shared only as combined statistics. In a group conversation, your answers to quizzes and practice problems feed group-level signals shown to other members: how the group answered, how hard the group found a problem, and "Checked by N" counts on shared research. Your individual answers are only ever shown to the group as combined statistics, and only once at least 5 members have answered. ("Checked by N"-style engagement counts appear once at least 2 members have contributed.) Only your first attempt on a problem counts toward these statistics.
Aggregates can outlive your membership. Combined statistics that no longer identify you may persist after you leave a group or delete your content.

Speaker support and the other people in the room

Speaker support is an optional feature. If you turn it on, the app keeps a voice profile of your own voice on your device so that it can tell your speech apart from everyone else's. The profile never leaves your device, and the app never builds one for anyone else. The Privacy Policy, Section 14.3, explains the profile in full.

Two things follow for the people you record:

The app measures how the conversation went, not who the other people are. With speaker support on, the app works out counts and timings on your device: how much you spoke, how much everyone else spoke, how many turns and interruptions there were, and, for the speech that is not yours, the pace, the pauses, the filler words, and the length of each run. Everyone other than you is measured as one combined group. Nobody else is told apart, named, profiled, scored, or given a history. What our servers receive is those numbers, never audio, never the words, never a voice profile.
You can switch the measuring off for any conversation. Open the conversation's settings and turn off speaker measures. That stops the measuring itself, not just what you see. If someone asks you not to measure their speech, that is the switch to use.

Speaker support does not change your obligations above. Measuring is not a separate act of recording, and it does not need a separate consent from the people in the room, but it only ever runs on audio you were entitled to capture in the first place. If you would like to mention it when you ask for consent, one honest sentence is enough:

"The app also keeps track of how much each of us talks so I can see how I did."

What Praesto does to help

We display a recording reminder the first time you start a new recording on a device.
The app shows a recording indicator on its main screens while capture is active. It is not visible on every screen (for example, it is hidden behind full-screen views and dialogs), so treat it as a reminder to you, not as a notice to the people around you.
You can stop recording at any time.
You can delete an individual transcript, a conversation, or your entire account from within the app or by emailing [email protected].

What Praesto cannot do for you

We cannot tell you whether the people in your room have consented.
We cannot tell you what your state's law is at a given moment.
We cannot rescue a recording that was made without consent. If you realize after the fact that you should not have recorded, your best step is to delete the audio, delete the transcript, and let the affected people know.

If you are recorded with Praesto without your consent

If you believe someone has recorded you using Praesto without the consent you were entitled to, contact us at [email protected]. We will review reports we receive, and where appropriate we will take down stored content and may investigate the user's account in accordance with our internal policies.