What Perch keeps, and what it doesn't.

Perch does not keep recordings. While you dictate, the audio streams to our servers and to Groq, the company that runs the speech recognition and language models Perch uses, and comes back as text while you talk. Nothing is written to our database or storage except the transcript and how long the recording ran.

Patients (name, species, breed, sex and the owner's name), visits and appointment times, rooms and doctors, vitals, every dictation transcript, the notes built from them with every earlier version, and who wrote, edited and signed each one. A clinical record is never silently rewritten: an edit adds a new version and keeps the old one.

Perch also keeps each clinic's own list of drug and disease names, which its vets can see and edit. When a vet corrects a misheard drug name in a note, Perch can add that name to the clinic's list. That list is never shared with another clinic.

Sign in is handled by Clerk. It holds each staff member's name, email address, the clinic they belong to and their role, and it sends the one time sign in codes. If you sign in with Google, Google shares your name, email address and profile picture with Clerk.

Optional. So a note can show who said what, a staff member can enroll their voice by reading a short card aloud. Perch turns that reading into a voiceprint, a list of numbers that describes the voice, and does not keep the reading itself. During a recording, Perch compares the voices it hears with the clinic's enrolled voiceprints to label each turn. The voices of people who have not enrolled, pet owners included, are never stored.

You can delete your voiceprint in Settings at any time, and a vet can delete anyone's in their clinic. Only a clinic owner can enroll someone else, and should do so only with that person's agreement.

If a clinic connects AVImark, Perch receives data from it through DataHub Vet: appointments, patients, pet owners' names, phone numbers and email addresses, staff and room names, species, breeds and vitals. Perch keeps a copy of what it receives so the day list stays in step with AVImark. Sending finished notes back to AVImark is off until the clinic turns it on. Disconnecting stops new data from arriving.

Pet owners do not use Perch directly. Their names and contact details reach Perch only through their clinic, typed in by staff or synced from AVImark. Perch can draft a plain language summary of a visit for the owner, but Perch itself never emails or contacts pet owners. Questions about an owner's information go to their clinic, and we help the clinic answer them.

Each of these receives only what its job needs:

• Google Cloud runs Perch's servers, in the United States.
• Neon hosts our database, in the United States.
• Groq runs speech recognition and the language models that draft notes. It receives the audio and text of each dictation.
• Clerk runs accounts and sign in.
• DataHub Vet carries the AVImark connection, for clinics that turn it on.
• Stripe handles card payments when a clinic pays by card. We never see full card numbers.
• Slack carries alerts to our team when an AVImark sync fails. An alert names the clinic, never a record.

We do not sell personal information or share it for advertising. We do not use clinic records to train AI models. Perch runs no advertising or analytics trackers. Our server logs are built to leave out clinical text: no transcripts, no notes, no pet or owner names.

Only signed in members of the clinic, and roles decide who may sign and change notes. Every connection to Perch uses HTTPS. Our team opens a clinic's records only to fix a problem the clinic reports or to keep the service running.

Perch uses the cookies Clerk needs to keep you signed in, and stores a few settings in your browser, such as the order of your day list. The app's pages load fonts from Google Fonts, which sees your IP address when they load.

The demo at perch.talcoe.com/demo needs no account and saves nothing. If you dictate into it, the audio and text are processed the same way as in the app to show you a note, then discarded.

Records stay while the clinic uses Perch. When a clinic leaves, it can ask us for a copy of its records, and we delete them within 30 days of its request; backups held by our database provider expire within 30 days after that. A staff member's name stays on the notes they wrote or signed, because a medical record has to show who made it.

You can ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, or ask us to correct or delete it, by emailing hello@talcoe.com. We answer within 30 days. When the information is part of a clinic's records, the clinic decides, and we pass your request to it.

Perch is for veterinary clinics. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.

When this policy changes, we update this page and the date at the top. Clinics are told directly about any change that affects their records.