Terms of Service

These terms are an agreement between you and Idea Engine LLC, a Wisconsin limited liability company (“Idea Engine LLC”, “we” or “us”), which operates banter. You accept them when you tick the box at sign-in confirming that you agree, and again when you subscribe to a paid plan. Our Privacy Policy and Refund Policy form part of these terms. If you do not agree, do not use banter.

What banter is

banter is a language-practice tool. You have a spoken conversation with an AI conversation partner — software, not a person — in a scenario you choose, and banter gives you a fluency score and corrections afterwards.

banter is a language-learning aid, not a certified language assessment. The CEFR bands (A1–C2) it shows are a rough anchor to help you see roughly where you are and what to work on next — they are not a certified placement, and they are not equivalent to a proctored exam or a qualification. Do not rely on a banter score as proof of language proficiency for immigration, education, employment or any other formal purpose.

Who can use banter

You must be at least 18 years old and able to form a binding contract to use banter, and you confirm this when you sign in. banter is for your own personal language practice.

Your account

You sign in with a one-time link we send to your email address, or with Google where we offer it. There is no banter password, so your account is only as secure as your email account (and your Google account, if you use it): anyone who can read your email can sign in as you. Keep them secure and tell us at support@idea-engine.studio if you think someone else has accessed your banter account. You are responsible for activity on your account.

Your microphone and other people

A live conversation uses your microphone. Before your first one, banter explains where the audio goes (see the Privacy Policy). Practice somewhere you are comfortable being heard, and do not use banter to record or transcribe anyone else. If other people may be picked up by your microphone, tell them first.

Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Use banter through scripts, bots or other automated or programmatic access;
• Attempt to circumvent your plan’s minute allowance or session limits, including by creating multiple accounts to get more than one free conversation;
• Use the conversation personas to generate hateful, harassing, sexually explicit, illegal, or otherwise harmful content, or try to make a persona break character for that purpose;
• Capture other people’s voices or conversations without their knowledge, or share other people’s personal information in a session without the right to do so;
• Copy, scrape, reverse engineer or build a competing product from banter, except where the law allows it despite this restriction;
• Interfere with or attempt to disrupt the service or its infrastructure; or
• Resell or provide commercial access to your account to anyone else.

Your content, and ours

What you say in banter — your transcripts — is yours. You give us a limited licence to store, process and display it, and to have our service providers process it, only to provide banter to you: running the conversation, scoring it, and keeping your history. We do not use it to train AI models or for advertising, and deleting your account deletes it (see the Privacy Policy).

banter itself — the app, the scenarios, the personas, the scoring method and our branding — belongs to Idea Engine LLC. We give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use it under these terms. To the extent any rights exist in the scores and corrections generated for you, you may use them freely for your own purposes.

AI output

Conversation replies, coaching hints, scores and corrections are generated automatically by AI models. They can be wrong, incomplete, inconsistent or occasionally odd or inappropriate, and the AI partner may state things that are not true. Use your own judgement, and do not rely on anything the AI says as professional, medical, legal, financial or other advice. If a persona produces something offensive, tell us at support@idea-engine.studio.

The free conversation

Every account gets one free 3-minute conversation, once. It is not a monthly allowance and does not renew. It is limited to one per person; creating additional accounts to get more is a breach of these terms.

Subscriptions and billing

• The price, billing interval (monthly or annual) and what each plan includes are shown on the pricing page and at checkout before you pay. Payments are processed by Stripe. Prices are in US dollars; any tax that applies is shown at checkout.
• Paid plans are billed in advance and renew automatically at the end of each billing period, at the then-current price, until you cancel. By subscribing you authorise us (through Stripe) to charge your payment method on each renewal.
• You can cancel at any time, online, from your account page (Account → Manage billing) — no call or email needed. Canceling stops future renewals; you keep access to your plan’s features for the rest of the period you already paid for.
• Minutes do not roll over. Unused minutes from one billing period do not carry into the next.
• We may change prices for future billing periods. If we do, we will email you before the change takes effect on your account, and you can cancel before your next renewal if you do not want to continue at the new price.
• See our Refund Policy for what happens if you want your money back.

Ending your account

You can stop using banter at any time, and you can delete your account yourself from /account; deleting it cancels any subscription and deletes your data as described in the Privacy Policy. We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches these terms, including without a refund for the current billing period where the breach involves abuse of the service. We may also stop offering banter; if we do, we will give paying subscribers reasonable notice and refund any prepaid period we can no longer provide.

Service availability

We do not guarantee that banter will be available at all times, or that any given session will complete without error. banter depends on third-party providers for speech recognition, the conversation model, and (on some plans) the video avatar; if one of them is unavailable or slow, a session may fail to start or may end early. We will try to make that failure clear to you rather than silent, but we cannot guarantee any particular provider will be reachable at any given moment.

Disclaimer and limitation of liability

banter is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement, to the fullest extent the law allows. To the fullest extent permitted by law, Idea Engine LLC is not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, or for lost profits or data, arising from your use of the service, and our total liability for any claim relating to banter is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose or US$100. Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded by law, including your rights under mandatory consumer protection law.

Indemnity

To the extent the law allows, you agree to indemnify Idea Engine LLC against claims by third parties arising from your breach of these terms or your misuse of banter, including capturing another person’s voice without their knowledge. This does not apply to the extent a claim is caused by us, and it does not limit any right you have as a consumer that cannot be waived.

Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Wisconsin, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute arising from them or from your use of banter will be heard in the state or federal courts located in the State of Wisconsin, and you and we consent to their jurisdiction. Before bringing a claim, please email us so we can try to resolve it informally. Nothing in this section removes any protection you have under the mandatory consumer law of the country or state where you live, including the right to bring a claim in your local courts where that law gives it.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. We will update the date at the top of this page, and for a material change we will email you at the address on your account before it takes effect. If you do not agree to a change, you can cancel and delete your account before it takes effect; continuing to use banter after that means you accept the updated terms.

General

These terms, with the Privacy Policy and Refund Policy, are the entire agreement between you and us about banter. If any part is found unenforceable, the rest stays in effect. If we do not enforce a term straight away, we have not waived it. You may not transfer these terms; we may transfer them to a successor operating banter, and will tell you if we do.

Contact

Questions about these terms: support@idea-engine.studio.

Idea Engine LLC, Wisconsin, USAMailing address available on request at privacy@idea-engine.studio