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AI Disclaimer

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What Bao actually does

FinTracker uses AI in four places:

  • Voice transcription — turning spoken transactions into text.
  • Transaction parsing — turning text like "5 quid coffee Pret yesterday" into a structured amount, category, merchant, and date.
  • Bao chat — answering natural-language questions about your money ("how much did I spend on groceries last month?").
  • Weekly insights — pattern detection across your spending and savings, written up as a short narrative.

Who powers the AI

OpenAI is our AI provider today. Your voice clips and chat messages are processed by OpenAI’s API. Under OpenAI’s API terms, the default is that your inputs are not used to train OpenAI’s models. OpenAI may retain API content for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring before deleting it.

If we change AI providers or add new ones, we’ll update this page before the change ships and notify waitlist and app users.

Blog narrations use the open-source Kokoro-82M text-to-speech model (Apache 2.0). The audio you hear was rendered on a laptop, not from a live AI service — no part of you or your data is involved in producing the recording.

What gets sent, and what doesn’t

  • Voice transactions: the audio clip is uploaded to OpenAI, transcribed, and the audio is discarded. Only the transcript reaches your device. Where on-device transcription is sufficient, no audio leaves your phone at all.
  • Bao chat: we summarize the relevant slice of your transactions on-device first, then send that compact summary — not your full history — along with your question.
  • Weekly insights: generated from aggregated, on-device statistics. We send patterns ("£X on groceries this week, up Y% vs last week"), not your raw transactions.
  • Never sent: bank login passwords or other credentials, account numbers, your contacts, your photos beyond explicitly attached receipts, or your location. Any future opt-in bank integration would use industry-standard OAuth flows so we never see your bank password.
  • Apple Pay transactions (when this feature ships): if you enable the planned Apple Pay tracking via Apple Shortcuts, the transaction details (amount, merchant, date) are sent to OpenAI for category prediction — same as voice transactions — and then stored only on your device. No Apple Pay transaction data is retained by OpenAI or by Bao Labs LLC.

What AI is good at, and where it gets things wrong

AI is useful for:

  • Extracting structured data from your messy spoken or typed input.
  • Surfacing patterns you might miss in your own spending.
  • Answering questions in plain language.

AI can and does:

  • Make mistakes — wrong amounts, wrong categories, wrong dates.
  • Hallucinate — invent details or claim certainty about things it doesn’t know.
  • Misinterpret context — especially currency, slang, or shorthand.

Always verify amounts before saving a transaction. Always sanity-check Bao’s answers against your actual records. Bao is a helper, not an authority.

Bao is not a financial advisor

Bao’s suggestions, insights, and chat answers are informational only — not professional advice. We do not assess your suitability for financial products, your tax situation, or your investment risk profile.

For regulated advice — pensions, investments, mortgages, tax planning — please speak with a qualified, regulated advisor in your jurisdiction.

You’re in control

You can:

  • Disable voice transactions in Settings → AI Features.
  • Disable Bao chat entirely.
  • Turn off weekly insights.
  • Skip cloud features entirely by leaving cloud sync off — voice and Bao chat both require connectivity, so disabling sync narrows what AI can do.

When you disable an AI feature, no data flows to OpenAI for that feature — period.

Data minimization

  • We send the least data needed to complete each AI task.
  • Voice audio is discarded after transcription.
  • Chat summaries are generated on-device so we never send your full transaction history.
  • Neither we nor our processors use your data to train AI models.

Future changes

If we add a new AI capability — say, automatic budget recommendations or a new AI provider — we will update this page and announce the change before it goes live. Material changes that affect what data leaves your device will require your opt-in.

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