Privacy & terms

What Ramble does

Ramble is a transcription service: it turns recordings into readable text. In the chats you allow, it sends voice notes (and videos, where they are turned on) to speech and language models, and cleans up what was said into clear text. View-once media is never touched. In disappearing chats, the text disappears on the same timer as the recording.

WhatsApp is only the channel. Ramble links to your account as a device, like WhatsApp Web, to receive the recordings and post the text back under them, as you, or, for a chat you make private, only into your own private group. It adds nothing to WhatsApp, offers no WhatsApp feature, and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to WhatsApp or Meta. Your WhatsApp account stays yours, under WhatsApp's own terms.

What you pay for

Any paid plan pays for the transcription: the minutes of audio turned into text, and the model doing it. It is never a charge for WhatsApp, for access to WhatsApp, or for any WhatsApp feature. Those are free from WhatsApp, and Ramble does not sell or resell them. A recording that cannot be transcribed is not counted.

Website sign-in and reports

Sign-in uses your WhatsApp number and a six-digit code valid for five minutes, sent only to your private control group. Browser sessions last a year from use and can be signed out in My area. Login codes are not added to automatic message retry caches. We retain limited pseudonymous login events for 90 days to measure errors and completion; those events contain no phone numbers, network addresses, codes, tokens or message content. Reports sent without signing in are stored separately for 30 days: the entered number is an unverified claim, not an account identity.

What we keep

Your WhatsApp session keys. Your settings: which chats are on or off, the language, the names you taught it. Feedback you send from the settings page, until your account is erased. The display names of chats and people it has seen, so it can credit a speaker. A short-lived fingerprint of each recording (a hash, not the audio), so a forwarded recording can be matched to its chat. The text of a recording stays in the server's memory for up to an hour, as a transient cache, so forwarding the same recording doesn't transcribe it twice.

When you sign up: the network address it came from, a rough location (from your browser's language and time zone), the kind of device and browser, and the site that sent you, if any. Only the operator sees these, to spot abuse and to know how people find Ramble, and they are deleted with your account. The site's pages also set a cookie holding a random number, to tell a returning browser from a new one: we note the kind of device and the referring site of its first visit, count its visits and sign-ups, and forget it after six months without a visit. It holds nothing else. Another cookie remembers the site's language, if you picked one.

Recordings are deleted right after they become text. If you explicitly opt in to help improve the product, your recordings and their text are kept for a limited time and then deleted automatically, and what the service did with each one (the text, who a dictated message was matched to, what was sent) is written to the server log so a bad result can be explained. That is off unless you ask for it. Outside that research opt-in and the separately approved business pilot below, message text and transcripts are not stored. They exist only in your WhatsApp.

Optional business assistant pilot

This pilot is off by default. An operator prepares a specific list of phone numbers and, if you want, specific groups, and a retention period; collection starts only after you approve that request from your linked WhatsApp account. It stores new incoming and outgoing messages in those direct chats, and new messages from every member in those groups: text, captions, contact identities, timestamps, locations, reply IDs, media metadata and available transcripts. Personal messages in those selected chats are included too. Please let the members of a selected group know. Other groups, your control group and view-once content are excluded; this feature does not download attachments or import past messages. Photos and videos are fingerprinted (a hash of the file, not the file) so that you are told in your control group when the same one is sent again. Your transcription and audio research settings remain separate.

The purpose is to build and support your business assistant. Authorized service operators can read this data. Business records are encrypted on disk and kept for your approved period, at most 30 days and 10,000 records; disappearing-message timers can shorten this. Write business stop in Notes to self or your control group to stop collection and delete the business message store. The latest consent record is retained until replaced by a new approval or your account is deleted. These deletion actions do not erase separate audio research records or external backups. Adding contacts or groups, or restarting, requires a new approval.

What passes through

As a linked device, every message on your account passes through this server in transit, as it would through WhatsApp Web. Only voice notes in allowed chats are processed, and videos where they are turned on, plus one kind of text: a short reply to one of our texts, from whoever spoke that recording, within a few minutes of it, which is checked as a possible correction. Other message content is dropped immediately unless it is covered by your separate business-pilot approval. Your recording and its text are sent to third-party AI providers through their APIs, to be transcribed and cleaned up. Under their API terms this data is not used to train models. Server logs hold counts, durations and error codes, never message text, transcripts or names.

The risk

To act as a linked device, Ramble uses an unofficial WhatsApp client, which is against WhatsApp's terms of service. In rare cases WhatsApp temporarily or permanently restricts accounts that do this. You link at your own risk: Ramble cannot prevent, lift or compensate a restriction of your WhatsApp account. If WhatsApp logs the device out or restricts the account, transcription stops until it is linked again, and on a paid plan the unused part of the period is refunded. It is provided as is, without warranty.

Leaving

Write leave in your Ramble group in WhatsApp and confirm with yes. That logs the device out of your WhatsApp and deletes everything about your account here. You can also remove the device in WhatsApp under Linked devices, at any time.