1Who you are agreeing with
SpanVoice is a service operated by ARKNET PTY LTD, a company registered in Australia and based in Brisbane, Queensland. In these terms, “we”, “us” and “our” mean ARKNET PTY LTD, and “you” means the person or organisation that holds the account.
By opening an account, or by running a session on an account that somebody opened for you, you agree to these terms. If you are agreeing on behalf of an organisation, you are confirming that you are allowed to do that.
2The words we use
We have kept the vocabulary small and used it consistently throughout these terms and everywhere else on the site.
- An account is the organisation that is billed. One account can hold more than one venue.
- A venue is a place or a group that runs events — a hall, a room, a company, a council, a school, a community group, a touring production. Each venue has its own settings and its own audience link.
- An event is a single occasion at a venue.
- A session is one run of the service: from the moment an operator starts it to the moment it stops.
- An operator is the person who starts and stops a session, from the desk application or from a browser.
- The audience are the people who open the link and read or listen along. They do not have accounts with us and we do not ask them for anything.
3Your account and who is responsible for it
You are responsible for everything done on your account, including by anybody you invite into it. Keep sign-in details to the people who need them, give each person their own, and tell us promptly if you believe someone has access who should not.
You must give us accurate details when you sign up and keep them current, in particular the email address we use to reach you. Notices about billing, about these terms, and about anything going wrong go to that address.
You must be old enough to enter a contract in the place where you live, and you must have the authority to commit the organisation you are signing up for.
4What you may run through the service
You may use SpanVoice for any lawful event. We do not vet the content of what is spoken in your room and we do not want to.
Lawful is not the same as suitable. Our accuracy notice sets out the kinds of event where automatic translation should not be relied on, and it forms part of these terms. Nothing in this section overrides it.
You must not use the service:
- to process audio you have no right to process, or where the people being recorded or translated have not been told that it is happening when the law where you are requires that they be told;
- to break any law that applies to you, or to help somebody else break one;
- to attack, overload, probe or reverse engineer the service, or to get around its limits, its billing, or its access controls;
- to resell or rebrand the service as your own without a written agreement with us;
- in a way that puts the service at risk for other customers.
Telling your audience what is happening is your responsibility, not ours. You are closer to your room than we are, you know who is in it, and you know which laws apply where you are standing. Where consent or a notice is required before speech is translated, captioned or kept, obtaining it is yours to do.
5Free credit when you start
New accounts are given an amount of credit so that the service can be tried properly before any money changes hands. No credit card is required to use it.
Free credit is given at our discretion. We may change the amount, change what it covers, offer it to some accounts and not others, or stop offering it entirely, at any time and without notice. It has no cash value, it cannot be transferred between accounts or exchanged for money, and it expires if an account sits unused.
If we believe free credit is being taken more than once by the same person or organisation through additional accounts, we may remove it and close the duplicate accounts.
6What it costs, and how you are billed
There is no monthly fee and no charge per person in your audience. You pay for what you use: the time a session runs, counted for each language your audience actually asked for, and spoken translation counted by the minute of audio produced.
The rates that apply are the ones published on our pricing page in your billing currency at the time the usage happens. Usage is drawn against the credit on your account. When your balance runs low you can add credit yourself, or you can turn on automatic top-up, which charges the card you have saved.
Card payments are handled by our payment provider. We never see or store your full card number.
Rates can change. We change published rates at most once a month and never retroactively: usage is charged at the rate in force on the day it happened. If a change raises what you pay, it takes effect from the first of a month, and we will tell you before it does. There is one exception: if a service we depend on raises its own prices without notice to us, we may have to pass that on sooner than the first of a month. That is an exception to the timing and to nothing else — it does not make any change retroactive — and we will tell you what happened and why.
Prices are exclusive of GST and any other tax unless stated otherwise. Where we are required to collect tax, it is added at checkout. Any other tax that applies to you because of where you are is yours to pay.
7Closing your account
You can close your account yourself at any time, from the admin panel, by signing in and following the steps there.
Closing an account has to be done through the admin panel. Asking us by telephone or by email is not enough and we will not act on it. This is not bureaucracy for its own sake. Closing an account ends live sessions, stops billing and starts transcripts down the road to deletion, and a message gives us no way to tell who is really asking. Signing in at least establishes who someone is; the panel then checks whether that person is allowed to do this, which is a second question and the one that actually matters. A telephone call answers neither. If you have lost access to the account, use the password recovery on the sign-in page first.
The same applies to anything else that changes the account: adding or removing people, changing the card, changing how long transcripts are kept. Those are all done in the admin panel by someone who is signed in.
There is one route for when nobody can sign in, because accounts outlive the people who set them up. If the person who held the account has left or died, the mailbox it was tied to is gone, the account has been taken over, or who controls it is genuinely in dispute, write to us through the contact form and say which of those it is. We will not act on the message by itself. We will ask you to show that you are entitled to act for the organisation, and what we ask for depends on what is at stake. While that is being sorted out we can suspend the account so that nothing further is billed. What we will not do is close an organisation’s account, or give somebody access to it, because a message arrived asking us to.
When an account is closed, unused credit is not refunded unless the law requires it. Transcripts are deleted on the ordinary schedule described in our privacy policy. Export anything you want to keep before you close the account.
8When we can suspend or close an account
We may suspend or close an account if:
- an amount owing is not paid after we have asked for it;
- the account is being used in one of the ways listed above as not allowed;
- the way it is being used is damaging the service for other customers;
- we are required to by law.
Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right. Where the problem is urgent — a live risk to the service, or something unlawful — we may act first and explain afterwards. If we close an account for one of these reasons, we may keep unused credit.
9The service will change
We add things, remove things and change how things work. We will not deliberately remove something you depend on without notice, but this is a service that is actively developed and it will not be identical in a year.
Languages, voices and features depend in part on services we buy from others, which can change outside our control. If a language or a voice stops being available, we will say so rather than quietly degrade it.
10Translation and captions are produced by machine
Everything the service produces — the captions on the screen, the text on phones, the spoken translation — is generated automatically. No person checks it before your audience sees or hears it, and it will sometimes be wrong.
Our accuracy notice explains what that means in practice, what makes the result better, and the situations the service is not suitable for. It forms part of these terms and you should read it before you rely on the output for anything that matters.
11Who owns what
We claim no ownership of what is spoken at your event or of the transcripts produced from it. We do not sell them and we do not use them to train anything.
What we cannot do is tell you that everything said in your room is yours. A guest speaker may hold rights in their own words, and something quoted from elsewhere may belong to someone else again. Whatever those rights are, they stay where they are — our point is only that none of them come to us.
We need a narrow permission in order to run the service at all: permission to receive your audio, process it, send text and audio to anyone who opens the link for your venue, and store transcripts for as long as your settings say. That permission exists only to deliver the service to you and ends when the data does.
The service itself — the software, the site, the name and the design — stays ours.
12What we do not promise
We work hard to keep the service running and accurate, but we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted, that it will be available at a particular moment, or that its output will be correct.
Do not rely on it as the only arrangement where being wrong would matter. If your event has a legal, medical, financial or safety consequence attached to what is understood, you need a human interpreter, and this service is not a substitute for one.
To the extent the law allows, the service is provided as it is, without warranties of any kind. Nothing in these terms excludes rights you have under the Australian Consumer Law or any other law that cannot be excluded by agreement. Where such a right applies and we are allowed to limit our liability for it, our liability is limited to supplying the service again or paying the cost of having it supplied again.
13Limits on what we owe you
Neither of us is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss — lost profit, lost business, lost opportunity, or loss arising from something said at an event being misunderstood.
Our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us in the three months before the claim arose.
Nothing here limits liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law.
14Which law applies
These terms are governed by the law of Queensland, Australia. Both of us submit to the courts of Queensland, without that preventing either of us from seeking an urgent order somewhere else where that is genuinely necessary.
If you use the service somewhere else in the world, you are responsible for complying with the law where you are, including any law about recording, translating or keeping a record of what people say.
15Changes to these terms
We may change these terms. When we do, we change the date at the top of this page.
If a change materially reduces what you get or increases what you pay, we will tell the account by email before it takes effect. Carrying on using the service after that date means you accept the new terms. If you do not accept them, close the account.
16Getting in touch
For anything about these terms, use the contact form. Remember that changes to an account itself have to be made in the admin panel by someone signed in — a message cannot do it.
SpanVoice is operated by ARKNET PTY LTD, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.