Participant information

What this 90-day pilot measures

SmarttyChoice Compare tests whether current, local price observations help people make commercial decisions. SmarttyChoice Business tests whether merchants can maintain useful records through a confirmation-based assistant. Each product receives its own Scale, Iterate or Stop decision.

What is collected

Optional customer registration stores a private profile after a verified sign-in and explicit review: your chosen name, preferred language, broad state/city, interest in comparison or business tools, verified contact details and optional update permissions. A number typed into a form is not verified. A phone verification does not prove a legal identity, and a WhatsApp contact number is not a public username or directory. Registration is an application for review, not merchant, staff or administrator access.

Google, Microsoft and Facebook sign-in use their own consent screens; SmarttyChoice does not collect those providers’ passwords or import contacts, messages or social feeds. Optional WhatsApp and email updates are off by default. Profiles must not be used for unsolicited messaging. A local preview does not register an account or send a verification code. Native-language interface wording and device voice are trial aids, not approved legal translations.

The pilot records account and cohort details, searches, product and price interactions, merchant business records you choose to confirm, support activity, experiment assignment, and research responses. Price observations retain their source, time, location, unit or variant, evidence state and confidence. The assistant may propose a record, but it cannot write directly to the Business ledger.

Decision-assistant questions

The floating SmarttyChoice assistant searches registered price evidence and, for an authenticated merchant, permitted business summaries. The question and answer history stays in the current browser tab. The server records only operational measurements such as question length, answer type and source count—not the question text. The assistant displays its evidence and states when the database cannot support an answer.

Optional AI voice and translation

When connected and approved for your selected language, AI voice uses Spitch to recognise a short recording, translate your question, and make a synthetic spoken answer. You must allow this processing before a recording or question is sent. Check and correct the recognised words before pressing Ask. Use Stop voice to discard an unfinished recording or stop playback. The spoken voices are AI-generated, not human recordings.

The cloud voice route uses public price evidence and product guidance only. It does not send private Business summaries or write to your ledger. Do not speak or type bank details, passwords, government identifiers or unrelated personal information. SmarttyChoice does not save raw microphone recordings to its database; transcripts and public replies may remain in bounded server memory for up to ten minutes for retry handling. Operation metadata is recorded without audio or question text. The speech provider's own processing and retention terms must be reviewed and approved before the feature is enabled.

Voice is optional. You can still browse the saved price comparisons without microphone permission. If a selected language is not connected, the site says so rather than silently speaking an English substitute. Translation, number pronunciation and mixed-language recognition need native-speaker testing before recruitment.

Why it is collected

Information is used to operate the pilot, protect the service, measure real behaviour and operating cost, assess willingness to pay, support participants and decide whether either product should be scaled, changed or stopped.

Your choices

Participation is voluntary. You may ask the pilot team to pause or withdraw your participant account. Do not enter special-category personal data, card details, bank PINs or unrelated third-party information, including in assistant questions. Research comments may be quoted only in de-identified form unless separate permission is obtained.

Access and retention

Access is restricted by participant role and merchant business. Pilot sessions expire. The operating team should retain identifiable pilot data only for the approved pilot retention period, then delete or de-identify it according to the signed study protocol and applicable Nigerian law.