Operator: HydroComplete LLC. Effective November 14, 2026
With your explicit consent through Ring's account linking, Doorstep Translator receives Ring's doorbell and motion alerts for the devices you share, and stores each device's name. At linking you give us your email address and the language you want visitors translated into; your browser also tells us its time zone so alert emails show local times. We use these for one purpose: to show you, in your language, what a visitor said after pressing your doorbell.
Doorstep Translator acts only when someone presses your doorbell. Motion alerts are ignored, so people walking past, deliveries left without a ring and conversations near the door are never processed. The one exception is a test you start yourself: when you press "Start a test" on your dashboard, for the next 15 minutes motion alerts from your shared devices are processed the same way, so you can try it by speaking in front of a camera. Test results are shown only on your dashboard and are never emailed.
In short: after a doorbell press, we download Ring's recording of that moment, take out the sound and turn the speech into text on our own server. The recording and the sound are deleted within seconds and never leave our server. Only the text is sent to Anthropic's Claude AI, and only when it needs translating.
Each device has a daily allowance of 40 doorbell presses, and the service as a whole has a daily allowance of 2,000. Past either allowance a press is not processed, and your dashboard says so.
The language a visitor spoke is used only to decide whether, and from what, to translate, and is shown next to that one visit so you can read the original. It is never used to describe, sort, count or profile visitors, never compiled into statistics about who comes to your door, and never shared with anyone.
Speech recognition is done by whisper.cpp with the "small" multilingual Whisper model, running on our own server; no outside company receives the sound. Translation is done by Anthropic's Claude (model claude-haiku-5-5), a general-purpose AI model, through Anthropic's commercial API. It receives only the transcript text and an instruction to translate it faithfully. Anthropic processes that text on our behalf and does not use data sent through its commercial API to train its models. Doorstep Translator does not train any model, and your data is never used to train any model, ours or anyone else's. Speech recognition and translation are automatic and can be wrong; every translation is shown with the words as heard, and unclear speech is marked as such.
Your email identifies your account and is where visit alerts are sent (you can turn email alerts off). Your language choice and time zone are used only for translating and for showing times.
We do not sell, share or disclose your data to any third party for their own purposes. Your dashboard is visible only to you, through your private link. Three sub-processors act on our behalf, all in the United States: Fly.io, Inc. (cloud hosting, where the recording is processed and speech recognition runs), which stores data and does not use it for anything else; Anthropic, PBC (AI translation), which receives only transcript text as described above; and Resend (email delivery), which receives your email address and the text of each alert.
Deletion is self-service. Delete all my data on your dashboard removes everything above from the live service at once. Encrypted host snapshots age out within 5 days, and copies held by Anthropic or Resend follow their retention periods described under What we keep. Removing Doorstep Translator from your Ring app does the same automatically. You may also request deletion, or a copy of your data, by email (below); we respond within 30 days.
Processing is fully automated. No person ever listens to your Ring recordings or views them, including during support: they are deleted within seconds, so they do not exist to be heard, and we have no tool to fetch your recordings for a person.
No person, including the developer, reads your visits in routine operation. If you ask for support or for a copy of your data, the developer may look at your text records (device names, and visit entries including the words as heard and translated) only to answer that request.
Nothing is collected until you complete Ring's account-linking consent. You choose which devices are used, the language, and whether to get emails; you can delete any visit's words, stop all collection by removing Doorstep Translator in the Ring app, and remove all stored data with the delete control. Turning off audio recording for a device in the Ring app also stops Doorstep Translator from receiving any sound from it. There is no advertising, data sale or AI training to opt out of: those uses do not happen.
Doorstep Translator is for adults aged 18 or over and is not directed at children. A visitor of any age who speaks after ringing will have their words transcribed like anyone else's; nothing about who they are is recorded, and their words are deleted after 7 days.
If we ever change what is taken from your recordings, we will update this page with a new date and show a notice on your dashboard before the change takes effect.
Access to your Ring account uses Ring's account-linking system; Doorstep Translator never sees your Ring password. Data travels over HTTPS and is stored on access-controlled, encrypted infrastructure.
Anyone, including people who are not customers, can report a suspected misuse of Doorstep Translator as described on our support page.
Questions, data requests or deletion requests: michaelbflynn@gmail.com