Privacy Policy

AppAI is an AI phone-answering service operated by Julian Thorpe, based in Christchurch, New Zealand. When this policy says “we”, “us”, or “AppAI”, it means that business. If you have any questions about this policy or your personal information, contact us at julian@appai.nz.

This policy covers two groups of people:

• Our customers — the businesses and people who enquire about, sign up for, or use AppAI.
• Callers — people who phone a business whose calls are answered by AppAI. When you call a business that uses AppAI, we process your information both to provide our service and on behalf of that business.

From our customers: your name, business name, email address, phone number, billing details, and the information you give us to set up and run your voice agent (for example your services, hours, and how you want calls handled).

From callers: your phone number, your name, the reason for your call, and any other details you choose to share during the call. To answer and summarise the call, our system processes the audio of the call and creates a written transcript and summary.

From website visitors: we keep this to a minimum. Our website does not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. Our hosting provider may keep standard technical logs (such as IP address and browser type) to operate and secure the site.

When AppAI answers a call, the caller is speaking with an automated AI voice assistant, not a live person. The assistant listens, responds, and captures the caller’s details so a real person from the business can call back. The call is processed and transcribed for this purpose, and a summary is sent by text message to the business. We aim to be transparent that a caller is speaking with an AI assistant.

We use personal information to:

• answer calls and capture each caller’s details;
• create a summary of each call and deliver it to the relevant business;
• set up, provide, maintain, support, and improve the AppAI service;
• handle billing, and respond to enquiries and requests;
• meet our legal obligations and protect against fraud or misuse.

We do not sell personal information. We share it only as needed to run the service:

• The business you called. Caller details and call summaries are provided to the business whose line AppAI answers.
• Trusted service providers. We use third parties to operate the service — for example our telephony, speech and AI processing, text-message delivery, hosting, scheduling, and payment providers. They process information on our behalf, under obligations of confidentiality and security, and only for the purposes above.
• Legal and safety reasons. Where required or permitted by law.

Some of our providers may store or process information outside New Zealand. Where that happens, we take reasonable steps to ensure your information is protected by comparable safeguards.

We take reasonable steps to keep personal information secure and to limit access to those who need it to do their job. No system can be guaranteed completely secure, but we work to protect your information from loss, misuse, and unauthorised access.

We keep personal information only for as long as we need it for the purposes described in this policy, or for as long as the law requires, and then securely dispose of it. Customers and callers can ask us to delete their information (see your rights below), and we will do so unless we are required to keep it.

Under the Privacy Act 2020 you have the right to ask for access to the personal information we hold about you, and to ask us to correct it if it is wrong. To make a request, email us at julian@appai.nz. We may need to confirm your identity first. If you called a business that uses AppAI, you can also ask that business about the information it holds.

If you have a concern about how we have handled your personal information, please contact us first at julian@appai.nz so we can try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (0800 803 909).

AppAI is a service for businesses and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

We may update this policy from time to time. When we do, we will change the effective date at the top of this page. Significant changes will be made clear on this page.

AppAI — Julian Thorpe
Christchurch, New Zealand
Email: julian@appai.nz
Phone: 027 232 6275