Terms of Service

These terms govern your use of banter, a service operated by [[OPERATOR: confirm legal entity name and registered address]]. By creating an account or using banter, you agree to them. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

What banter is

banter is a language-practice tool. You have a spoken conversation with an AI conversation partner 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.

Your account

You sign in with a Google account through our identity provider. You must be at least 16 years old to use banter. You are responsible for keeping your Google account secure — anyone who can sign in to it can sign in to your banter account.

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 for that purpose;
• Use the conversation personas to generate hateful, harassing, sexually explicit involving minors, illegal, or otherwise harmful content, or to try to make a persona break character for that purpose;
• Interfere with or attempt to disrupt the service or its infrastructure; or
• Resell or provide commercial access to your account to anyone else.

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.

Subscriptions and billing

• Paid plans are billed monthly or annually, in advance, and renew automatically at the end of each billing period until you cancel.
• You can cancel at any time. Cancelling 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, whether you are on the free plan or a paid one.
• We may change prices for future billing periods. If we do, we will give you notice 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.

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”, without warranties of any kind, to the fullest extent the law allows. To the fullest extent permitted by law, banter and its operator are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential damages arising from your use of the service, and our total liability for any claim relating to banter is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose. Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded by law.

Governing law

[[OPERATOR: confirm governing law and jurisdiction for these terms before publishing]]

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. If we make a material change, we will update the date at the top of this page and make reasonable efforts to let you know. Continuing to use banter after a change takes effect means you accept the updated terms.

Contact

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