Privacy

Readwave is local-first. For everyday read-aloud with the built-in voices, your text is turned into speech on your own machine and never leaves it.

The short version

Free / local voices: text is synthesized on-device. It does not leave your computer.
Pro cloud voices and Smart Reading: text is sent to a cloud service to generate the audio or to summarize / translate / simplify it.

That's the whole distinction: local features stay local; cloud features need the cloud.

What stays on your device

When you use Readwave's free, local voices (Ava, Miles, Emma, George):

The text you read is processed by the bundled local engine running on your machine.
The resulting audio is played through your local audio output.
No text is uploaded for these reads.

All of your app data is also stored locally on your computer and persists across restarts:

Your settings, selected voice, and custom pronunciations.
Your queue.
Your read history and usage stats (shown on Home and Activity).

This data lives on your machine. See Where your data is stored.

What Pro cloud features send

At launch, one Pro feature uses a cloud service and therefore sends text off your machine:

Smart Reading — to summarize, translate, or simplify text before reading it, the text is sent to the cloud for processing.

Coming soon: studio cloud voices will send the text you're reading to a cloud service to generate the audio.

If you never use Smart Reading, no text is sent — even on a Pro plan, choosing a local voice keeps the read on-device.

Choosing local vs. cloud

Want everything to stay on your machine? Use the free/local voices and don't use Smart Reading.
Want Smart Reading (summarize, translate, simplify)? That's cloud-powered by design. Studio cloud voices are coming soon.

You're always in control of which voice you select, so you decide read-by-read whether a read is local or cloud.

Where your data is stored

Readwave stores your settings, voice choice, pronunciations, queue, history, and usage in a local data file on your Windows machine (read4me.json, managed by the app). It is not synced to the cloud by Readwave itself.