Bolo Privacy Policy

Bolo is a push-to-talk dictation app for Windows published by Kingdom Vision. This policy explains what Bolo does with your voice and your text. In short: your audio goes to Groq to be turned into text, everything else stays on your PC, and Bolo has no servers of its own.

Audio and the microphone

• To start instantly, Bolo keeps the microphone open while it is running and holds only the last second of sound in memory, overwriting it continuously. That rolling buffer is never saved or sent anywhere unless you start a take.
• A take starts when you press your hotkey and ends when you release it (or, in hands-free mode, which you turn on with a double-tap, when you press the hotkey again). The take includes that short buffer so your first word is not cut off.
• The audio for a take is sent to Groq for transcription with Whisper. Until the text has been pasted, the take is kept in a temporary file on your PC so it can be recovered after a crash; it is deleted once the paste succeeds, unless you turn on Keep recordings on this PC.

Groq

Bolo uses Groq for speech-to-text and, if you turn on cleanup, to remove filler words and fix punctuation in the transcript. For those features, the take's audio and the transcript text are sent to Groq's API. Groq handles that data under its own privacy policy. Bolo does not send your audio or text to any other company. A normal install includes a key so you do not have to paste one. Your audio still goes only to Groq for those features.

Bolo runs no servers

Bolo has no backend and no account system. Nothing you say or type is uploaded to, or stored on, any server run by Bolo or its publisher.

What stays on your PC

• History: your most recent 50 transcripts are saved on your PC so you can copy or paste them again. You can turn history off in Settings.
• Settings, dictionary and personal memory: your hotkey, language, character, custom words and what Bolo has learned are saved on your PC.
• Your Groq API key: if you add your own key, it is stored in Windows Credential Manager. It is not written to the settings file and it is not logged.
• Diagnostic log: a local log records timings and errors. It does not contain your API key or your transcripts.

Personal memory

Bolo can learn the names, words and corrections you use, and your writing style, so it makes fewer mistakes. You can also teach a spelling. This memory is saved only on your PC. It is never uploaded to Bolo or its publisher. Open What Bolo has learned in Settings to see everything it has learned and forget any item, or all of it, at any time.

Updates

Bolo checks this website for new versions so it can offer an in-app update. That check does not send your audio, text, history or memory.

Offline fallback

If Groq is unavailable, Bolo can transcribe on your PC instead using an open-source Whisper model. The first time this is needed, Bolo downloads the model from Hugging Face and the whisper.cpp program from GitHub. These are plain file downloads; no audio or text is sent to them. You can turn the offline fallback off in Settings.

No ads, tracking or analytics in the app

The Bolo app shows no ads, contains no trackers, and collects no analytics or telemetry. Links on this website to Microsoft Store and the installer carry a campaign name for the button that was clicked. That name stays in the link address.

This website

This website uses Google Analytics 4 to count visits and to see which pages were opened and which countries those visits came from. It also uses Umami, a first-party visit counter hosted at stats.thebetawebsite.com, to count page views. Umami is configured not to use advertising cookies. Country is estimated from the IP address and is approximate. The site does not use this for ads. Ad storage, ad user data, and ad personalization are off.

Visitors in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland are asked first. Accept allows analytics cookies. Decline leaves them off. Outside those places, analytics cookies are allowed and no question is shown. To change a choice, clear this site's data in your browser; the saved choice is removed and the question is shown again in those regions. You can also opt out with Google's opt-out add-on. Google Analytics keeps this data for Google's default retention period. Google describes its own handling in the Google privacy policy.

Clipboard and other apps

To paste your text, Bolo briefly places the transcript on the clipboard, presses Ctrl+V for you, and then restores what was there before. Bolo checks which app is in front only to choose a cleanup style on your PC; that is not sent anywhere.

Deleting your data

You can clear your history in the app, remove your API key in Settings, and uninstall Bolo at any time. Because Bolo keeps no copy on any server, there is nothing for us to delete remotely. For data held by Groq, see Groq's privacy policy.

Children

Bolo is a general productivity tool and does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be posted on this page with a new effective date.

Contact

Questions about privacy can be sent to Kingdom Vision, the publisher of Bolo, through the contact page.