About Piou

Piou is a messaging app where everyone writes and reads in their own language. Each message is kept in its original language, then translated on the phone of the person who receives it. Piou is published by ALTRIX FZCO, a free zone company based in Dubai (United Arab Emirates).

Why Piou exists

Many people talk every day with someone who doesn't share their language: a French-Thai couple, a family whose grandparents only speak Portuguese, an employer and their household staff, an expat family and their nanny, roommates from four different countries. Copying every message into a translator gets tiring fast, and people end up saying only the bare minimum.

Piou starts from a simple idea: you write as usual, in your language, and the other person reads you in theirs. The original is always one tap away, to check a word or to learn the other person's language.

How it works

Your message is sent exactly as you wrote it, along with its original language, detected on your device.
On the side of a recipient who subscribes to Piou Premium, it is translated on their device: by Apple's built-in translation on iPhone, by ML Kit on Android, and in the browser by the open-source Bergamot engine with the Firefox Translations models.
No online translation service is used, and translations are never sent to our servers.
Once the languages are downloaded, translation also works offline, as does face-to-face mode, where a single phone placed between two people shows the translation and reads it aloud.

Piou supports 20 languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Our model

Messaging is free, with no time limit: chats, groups, voice messages, photos, videos, documents, status updates, audio and video calls.
Translation is part of Piou Premium, after a 7-day free trial: €4.90 a month or €39 a year in the euro area, $5.99 a month or $47.99 a year in the United States, with prices adapted to each country. You can gift Premium to someone you love.
No advertising, no sale of data. We make our living from subscriptions, not from your attention.

Our privacy choices

Translations stay on your device.
The numbers in your address book are turned into fingerprints on your phone before anything is sent.
Messages are hosted in Paris (France), encrypted in transit and at rest. They are not end-to-end encrypted: we would rather say so clearly.
Our statistics are internal, with no cookies and no third-party tools.

The publisher

ALTRIX FZCO — a Free Zone Company registered with the International Free Zone Authority (IFZA), license No. 66415 — Building A1, Dubai Digital Park, Dubai Silicon Oasis, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Publication director: the legal representative of ALTRIX FZCO.

Contact: support@piou.chat