Press

Piou is a messaging app where everyone writes and reads in their own language: each message is translated on the device of the person who receives it, with no online translation service. This page gathers verifiable facts for journalists. Press contact: support@piou.chat.

Fact sheet

• Name: Piou (the name comes from the chirp of a chick in French; the mascot is a yellow chick inside a chat bubble).
• Publisher: ALTRIX FZCO, a Free Zone Company registered with IFZA, license No. 66415.
• Registered office: Building A1, Dubai Digital Park, Dubai Silicon Oasis, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
• Website: piou.chat — web app: app.piou.chat.
• Platforms: iPhone (iOS 18 or later), Android, installable web app.
• Languages: 20 — English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean.

What Piou does

• Complete, free messaging: one-to-one and group chats, voice messages, photos, videos, documents, disappearing messages, location sharing, polls, stickers, status updates, audio and video calls.
• With Piou Premium: automatic translation of messages, polls and status updates; transcribed and translated voice messages; translated subtitles during calls; face-to-face mode, usable offline once the languages are downloaded.
• The original of every message always remains visible.

How the translation works

• Each message is stored in its original language.
• It is translated on the recipient's device: Apple's built-in translation (iPhone), ML Kit (Android), the open-source Bergamot engine and Firefox Translations models under the MPL-2.0 license (browser).
• No cloud translation API: translation costs nothing to run and the translated text does not leave the device.
• In the web app, language pairs without English go through English.

Prices

• Free messaging, with no time limit.
• Piou Premium: €4.90 a month or €39 a year in the euro area, after a 7-day free trial (payment method required). Prices are adapted by country, for example $5.99 a month in the United States, AED 21.99 in the United Arab Emirates, and THB 89 in Thailand.
• Premium can be gifted to someone else.

What Piou does not do

• No end-to-end encryption: messages are encrypted in transit and at rest, and hosted in Paris (France).
• No advertising, no sale of data, no third-party analytics tools.
• No calls to regular phone numbers: calls are between Piou users.
• No languages other than the 20 listed.

Hosting and providers

Data hosted by Supabase (Amazon Web Services infrastructure, Paris region); website and web app hosted by Vercel; emails and text messages via Brevo; payments by Stripe on the web, and by Apple and Google in the apps; subscriptions unified by RevenueCat.

Press contact

support@piou.chat — please put "Press" in the subject line. Logo, visuals and screenshots on request.