Car Voice for Hermes

Privacy policy

Car Voice for Hermes (Android app com.vantixwealthlabs.carvoice) and the Car Voice bridge. Last updated 17 October 2026.

In short: Car Voice sends your questions only to your own bridge, which you run, and the bridge talks to your own Hermes Agent. The developer of Car Voice runs no server for it and receives none of your data. The app contains no advertising or analytics code and has no account. Some parts do use third-party services, listed below.

On your phone (the app)

Data	What happens
Your voice	Recorded only while Car Voice listens: after you tap Talk, when you open it in Android Auto with Start listening when you open Car Voice on, and for a follow-up after an answer. The recording is sent over HTTPS to your bridge (plain http only to a bridge on the phone itself) and is not stored on the phone.
Typed questions	Sent to your bridge the same way.
Conversation on screen	Kept in memory only; never written to storage.
Bridge address and access token	Stored on the phone, encrypted with a key in the Android Keystore, excluded from backups. The token is never shown again after saving and never put in logs or URLs.
Settings, trial start date, unlock status	Stored in the app’s private storage, excluded from backups and device transfers.
Language and reply style	Your phone’s language (or the one you chose) and Short/Full are sent to your bridge with every question.
Microphone reports	When a listening attempt fails, the app sends a one-line report to your bridge (microphone source and input device name, peak sound level, duration, car API level, whether Android Auto was connected, a technical error name; no audio and no words), which forwards it to your Telegram chat if you set that up.

Permissions: microphone (to hear your question), internet and network state (to reach your bridge) and Google Play billing (the one-time unlock). Libraries add a wake lock and an internal broadcast permission; neither gives access to your data.

Third-party services the app uses

• Google Play handles the one-time unlock purchase and its restore. Google’s privacy policy applies.
• Android Auto (Google) shows Car Voice on the car screen and provides the car microphone.
• Google code scanner (Google Play services) reads the pairing QR code. The camera runs inside Google Play services; Car Voice gets no camera permission and receives only the text of the code. Google states that the image processing happens on the device and that it does not store the images or scan results. The underlying ML Kit SDK sends diagnostics and usage data to Google, such as device model, OS and app version, performance metrics and a per-installation identifier; see Google’s ML Kit data disclosure.
• Android text-to-speech on your phone reads error messages, and the answer if the bridge’s audio cannot be played. That is the speech engine installed on your phone.

On your bridge (which you run)

The bridge is software you install on your own machine; you decide where it runs and which services it uses.

• Questions and answers stay in the bridge’s memory for 15 minutes so a dropped mobile connection can pick up a running answer. On disk it keeps only which Hermes conversation is current, per phone. Logs contain no tokens, audio or text of questions and answers, only stages, lengths and timings.
• Speech recognition runs on your machine with local Whisper, or, if you configure an OpenAI-compatible service (for example Groq), your recorded question is sent to that service under its privacy terms.
• Hermes Agent receives the text of your question and answers it with whatever models and tools you have configured in Hermes. That is outside Car Voice.
• Text to speech uses Microsoft’s Edge online text-to-speech service: the text of each spoken answer is sent to Microsoft to create the audio.
• Telegram (optional, off unless you configure it): the full text of long answers and the microphone reports are sent to your chat through the Telegram Bot API. The bridge keeps the sent texts (the newest 2,000) in outbox.sqlite3 in its data directory.

Deleting your data

• On the phone: Settings › Connection › Clear connection removes the address and token; uninstalling the app removes everything it stored.
• On the bridge: remove the phone’s entry from the tokens file, and delete the bridge’s data directory.

Children

Car Voice is not directed at children.

Changes and contact

Changes to this policy are published on this page with a new date. Questions: use the developer contact in the Google Play listing of Car Voice for Hermes.