Terms of Service

These Terms are a contract between you and Windstorm Labs LLC ("we", "us"), covering Windy Word and the Windy account you use with it (together, "the Service").

By creating a Windy account or using Windy Word, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not create an account and do not use the Service.

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1. What Windy Word is

Windy Word is a voice-to-text application that runs on your own computer. It includes ten speech and translation engines: seven speech engines that transcribe speech into text in the same language or into English, and three translation specialist engines, the largest of which covers 452 languages and dialects (419 languages plus 33 regional and script variants).

Three engines are included in the download. The other seven can be added or removed at any time from inside the app.

Transcription runs on your device. The engines are files on your computer and the processing happens there. You do not need an internet connection to dictate.

Some optional features — cloud compute, Windy storage, and synchronisation between devices — run on our servers instead. Those are described in section 7 and are the only paid parts of the Service.

2. This is research software, and what that means for you

Please read this section. It is the most important one in this document, and it is short.

Windy Word is built by Windstorm Labs, a research organisation. The Engines are the output of ongoing machine-learning research, not of a settled manufacturing process. We build them, measure them, and ship the ones that work well enough to be useful — but speech recognition and machine translation are unsolved problems, and we would rather tell you that plainly than imply a precision nobody in this field can deliver.

Concretely, and without limiting section 13:

1. Accuracy is not guaranteed, and varies enormously. How well an Engine performs depends on your microphone, the room, background noise, your accent, the language you speak, the subject matter, and which Engine you chose. Two people can get very different results from the same Engine, and the same person can get different results on different days.
2. The Engines can be confidently wrong. They do not signal uncertainty. A mistranscription or mistranslation looks exactly like a correct one. Read what it produced before you rely on it. One known example: Windy Edge is English-only, and given speech in another language it will generally produce fluent-looking English rather than an error or an empty result.
3. Engines change, and may be withdrawn. We retrain, requantise, replace and sometimes retire Engines between versions. An Engine may behave differently after an update, and a future version may not include an Engine that a previous one did. Section 6 protects the version you have installed; it does not freeze our research.
4. Experimental features are labelled and are not finished. Anything presented as experimental, beta, preview or research may be incomplete, may change substantially, may produce poor results, and may be removed. Do not build anything you care about on top of it.
5. Do not use the Service where being wrong would be serious. That includes medical, legal, financial, employment, safety-critical, emergency and evidentiary use. If you use it in those settings anyway, a competent human must check the output before it is relied on. This is not boilerplate — it is the single most likely way this software causes someone real harm.
6. We publish what we know. Where we have measured a limitation, we say so — in the app, in the Third-Party Notices, or in our model documentation. Where we have not measured something, we do not claim it.

None of this reduces the rights the law gives you, and none of it applies to anything we are not permitted to disclaim — see section 13.

3. Definitions

Capitalised terms have the meanings below. They are defined once here and used consistently throughout, so that a right granted in one section is not narrowed by looser wording in another.

"App" or "Windy Word" means the Windy Word desktop application, including its installer, updates and new versions.

"Engine" means one of the speech or translation models distributed by us for use with the App. "Bundled Engines" are the three included in the download. "Additional Engines" are the other seven, downloaded from inside the App on request. "Engines" means all ten together.

"Cloud Feature" means any part of the Service that runs on our servers rather than on your device — currently cloud compute, Windy storage and cross-device synchronisation.

"Local Use" means using the App and the Engines on your own device without a Cloud Feature. Local Use does not require an internet connection.

"Windy Account" means the account described in section 4, used to download the App and to access Cloud Features.

"Your Content" means the audio you dictate, the text produced from it, and anything else you create or submit using the Service.

"Usage Measurements" means the information described in section 10 — measurements about how the Service is used. Usage Measurements do not include Your Content.

"Third-Party Components" means software and models incorporated into or distributed with the Service that are owned by third parties and licensed under their own terms, including the open-source software and the openly licensed upstream models identified in the Third-Party Notices.

"Third-Party Notices" means the notices file distributed with the App and available from Help ▸ Third-Party Notices, which identifies each Third-Party Component, its licence, its copyright holder, and what we changed.

"Upstream Model" means the openly licensed model from which one of our Engines is derived, as identified in the Third-Party Notices.

4. Your Windy account

An account is required to download Windy Word. You create it on our website before the download begins.

To create an account you provide:

• your first and last name;
• an email address, which becomes your account and recovery email; and
• optionally, a mobile telephone number.

You must confirm your account through either the email address or the mobile number. Confirming by text message does not remove the need for a working email address, because password reset and account recovery are available only by email. If the address you give us is not one you can receive mail at, you may lose access to your account permanently, and we may be unable to restore it.

One account is intended per person. If you try to register an email address that already has an account, we will ask you to sign in to that account instead of creating a second one. Please keep a single Windy account rather than several — your settings, entitlements and history are tied to it.

Your Windy Account works across Windy platforms. The same credentials can be used to access other products in the Windy ecosystem, subject to their own terms.

You are responsible for keeping your credentials confidential and for activity under your account. Tell us promptly at [email protected] if you believe your account has been used without your permission.

5. Minimum age

You must be at least 13 years old to create a Windy Account. Where local law sets a higher age for consent to processing personal data, that higher age applies. If you are under 18, you must have permission from a parent or guardian.

6. The free local licence

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and use the App and the Engines — Bundled and Additional alike — on as many devices as you personally use, at no charge, for your own personal or internal business use.

There is no subscription and no recurring fee for Local Use. The version you install keeps working on your device without further payment. We are not promising that every future version, Engine or feature will be free, and we may change what new versions include.

For the avoidance of doubt, this licence covers all ten Engines. Downloading an Additional Engine from inside the App does not create a separate charge or a separate licence.

7. Paid features

Cloud compute, Windy storage, cross-device synchronisation and similar Cloud Features are optional and may carry a charge, shown to you before you buy. Cloud Features depend on our servers and require an account in good standing. Fees and billing cycles for those features are presented at the point of purchase. Cancellations and refunds follow our Refund Policy.

If you never enable a Cloud Feature, you never owe us anything.

8. What you may not do

You may not:

1. Sell, resell, rent, sublicense or redistribute the App, the Engines, or any part of them, whether alone or bundled with something else.
2. Use the Service to provide a competing transcription or translation service to third parties, whether paid or unpaid.
3. Reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or attempt to derive the source code of the Service or the Engines, or defeat, disable or circumvent any licensing, entitlement, integrity or measurement mechanism, except to the limited extent such a restriction is unenforceable under applicable law or is permitted by the licence of a Third-Party Component.
4. Modify, patch or create derivative works of the Service, or run a modified build, and then represent it as Windy Word.
5. Remove, obscure or alter any proprietary notice, mark or attribution, including the Third-Party Notices.
6. Use the Service for unlawful purposes, to process content you have no right to process, or to record people where recording them is unlawful.
7. Interfere with, disrupt, probe or place an unreasonable load on our infrastructure, or attempt to gain unauthorised access to it.
8. Use the Service to build a competing product, or to train a machine-learning model on its outputs for that purpose.

Windy Word as a whole is not open source. The application, its source code, our fine-tuned model weights, our packaging and quantisation work, and the user interface are our property. Being able to run software on your own machine does not grant you rights to its internals.

Some components we build on are open source, and your rights in those come from their own licences rather than from these Terms — see section 9. Nothing in this section is intended to restrict any right you hold under one of those licences, and where this section and such a licence conflict, that licence governs the component it covers.

9. Third-party components and open-source models

This section exists because it describes something true of every Engine we ship, and because getting it wrong is a licence violation rather than a matter of tone.

Our Engines are derived from openly licensed Upstream Models. Each of our Engines began as a publicly available speech or translation model — principally the Whisper family, Distil-Whisper, M2M-100, MADLAD-400 and OPUS-MT — which we then fine-tuned, quantised and packaged for local inference. The Third-Party Notices identify, for every Engine: the Upstream Model, its licence, its copyright holder, and a statement of what we changed.

Your rights in Third-Party Components come from their own licences, not from these Terms. Nothing in these Terms restricts, and nothing in these Terms is intended to restrict, any right granted to you by the licence of a Third-Party Component. Where these Terms and such a licence conflict, that licence governs the component it covers, and these Terms continue to govern everything else.

What is ours and what is not. We do not claim ownership of any Upstream Model or of the architectures they are built on. What is ours is the App, our fine-tuned weights, our conversions and quantisations, our packaging, and the software around them. Fine-tuning a model does not extinguish the upstream licence, and we do not assert that it does.

Free and open-source software. The Service includes free and open-source software distributed under its own terms, including permissive licences (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD), Creative Commons Attribution licences, and — within the bundled Python runtime — components under the GPL and LGPL. Where a licence entitles you to the corresponding source code, you may obtain it from the upstream project, or by written request to [email protected]; where we are required to provide it we will do so, and we may charge no more than the cost of the media and delivery.

No warranty for Third-Party Components. We provide no warranty of any kind, express, implied or statutory, in respect of any Third-Party Component, including as to its functionality, security, accuracy, reliability or fitness for a particular purpose. Third-Party Components are provided under their own licences, which generally disclaim all warranties, and section 13 applies to them.

Changes. Which Third-Party Components we use may change between versions. The Third-Party Notices distributed with a given version describe that version.

10. Measurement, notices and communications

This section describes things we do that you are agreeing to. It is written plainly on purpose; the detail is in the Privacy Policy.

Measurement. The App reports Usage Measurements to us — for example how long it is used, whether it is active or idle, which Engines and languages are selected, version and platform, and approximately where it is used — country, region and city or metro area, derived from the network address your app connects from. We do not collect GPS or precise location, and we do not collect your street address. It does not send us your dictated text, your audio, or your transcripts. Our servers are built to reject events that carry text content. See Privacy Policy sections 2 and 3.

In-app notices. We may show messages inside the App from time to time — product news, version notices, and offers. They are dismissible.

Email and text messages. We may contact you about your account, security and service changes; these are not optional, because they are part of operating your account.

Marketing email and text messages are separate. We send those only if you opt in, you can withdraw at any time, and withdrawing does not affect your free local licence. Where the law requires separate express consent for marketing messages — including the EU, the United Kingdom, India and the United States — we ask for it separately at signup rather than treating your acceptance of these Terms as consent.

Message and data rates may apply to text messages. Reply STOP to opt out of marketing texts.

11. Ownership of your content

Your Content is yours. We claim no ownership of it.

For Local Use, Your Content stays on your device and we do not receive it. If you choose to use a Cloud Feature, you grant us the limited licence needed to operate that feature for you — process, transmit and store the content you send — and nothing more. That licence ends when you delete the content or close your account, except for backups held for the period described in the Privacy Policy.

We do not use Your Content to train or improve our Engines, and we will not start doing so without asking you first. If we ever offer a feature that is built from your own recordings — for example a voice or likeness model of you — it will be something you choose, described to you before you choose it, and separately consented to. Turning such a feature down will not affect your free local licence.

12. Your responsibilities, and indemnity

You are responsible for Your Content and for how you use the Service. In particular, you are responsible for having the rights you need in anything you record or process, and for complying with the laws that apply where you are — recording laws in particular, which differ from place to place and sometimes require the consent of everyone being recorded.

To the extent permitted by applicable law, you agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from third-party claims, and from the resulting damages, losses and reasonable legal costs, to the extent they arise from:

1. Your Content, or your recording or processing of any person without the consent or other legal basis that the law requires;
2. your use of the Service in breach of section 8; or
3. your infringement of another party's intellectual property or privacy rights through your use of the Service.

This obligation applies only to the extent the claim is caused by you, and not to the extent it is caused by us. We will notify you promptly of any claim we seek indemnity for, will not settle it without your consent (not to be unreasonably withheld), and will let you participate in its defence.

13. Availability, warranties and liability

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, uninterrupted or error-free operation, and any warranty as to the accuracy, completeness or reliability of transcription or translation. Speech recognition and machine translation produce mistakes. Do not rely on the Service where an error could cause harm, including medical, legal, financial, safety-critical or emergency use, without independent human review.

We give no warranty that any Engine will achieve any particular level of accuracy, that it will perform comparably on your hardware, in your language or for your accent, that its behaviour will remain the same across versions, or that any result you obtained once will be reproducible. As section 2 explains, these are research artefacts and we do not represent otherwise. No statement we make — in the app, in the installer, in documentation or in marketing — creates a warranty beyond what this section allows.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total liability arising out of or relating to the Service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or USD $100. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data or goodwill.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions or limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

14. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Service and delete your account at any time.

We may suspend or terminate your account if you materially breach these Terms, including section 8. Where practical and lawful we will tell you why and give you an opportunity to correct it first.

If your account is terminated, Engines already installed on your device continue to function locally; access to Cloud Features ends.

Survival. The following survive termination or expiry of these Terms, however caused: section 2 (Research software), section 3 (Definitions), section 8 (What you may not do), section 9 (Third-party components), section 11 (Ownership of your content), section 12 (Your responsibilities, and indemnity), section 13 (Availability, warranties and liability), section 15 (Export control and sanctions), section 17 (Disputes) and section 18 (General). Any payment obligation accrued before termination also survives.

15. Export control and sanctions

The Service includes cryptographic functionality and is subject to export control and sanctions laws, including those of the United States.

You represent that you are not located in, and are not ordinarily resident in, a country or territory subject to comprehensive trade sanctions, and that you are not a person with whom dealings are prohibited under applicable sanctions law — including any party on the U.S. Treasury Department's Specially Designated Nationals list or the U.S. Department of Commerce Denied Persons or Entity Lists.

You agree not to export, re-export or transfer the Service except as permitted by the laws of the United States, the laws of the jurisdiction in which you obtained it, and any other applicable law. You agree not to use the Service for any purpose prohibited by those laws, including the development or production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

16. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. For changes that materially reduce your rights or materially increase your obligations, we will give notice — in the App, by email, or both — before they take effect, and where the law requires it we will ask for your agreement. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms.

17. Disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Utah, USA, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. Subject to the paragraph below, disputes will be resolved in the state and federal courts located in Utah, USA.

Nothing in this section prevents you from bringing a complaint to a data protection authority or other regulator, or from using a small-claims court where one is available to you. If you are a consumer in the EU or the UK, nothing in these Terms deprives you of the protection of the mandatory law of the country where you live, or of your right to bring proceedings there.

18. General

Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and the consents you give at signup, are the entire agreement between us about the Service, and replace any earlier understanding about it. The licences covering Third-Party Components sit alongside these Terms and are not replaced by them.

Governing language. These Terms are drafted in English. We may provide translations for convenience; if a translation conflicts with the English text, the English text governs, except where the law that applies to you requires otherwise — in which case the version in your own language governs to the extent that law requires.

Severability. If any provision is held unenforceable, it will be enforced to the maximum extent permissible and the rest of these Terms will remain in force.

No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision, that is not a waiver of it or of any other provision.

Assignment. You may not assign or transfer these Terms or your Windy Account. We may assign these Terms to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, provided your rights under them are not reduced.

No construction against the drafter. Any rule that an ambiguity is construed against the party that drafted the contract does not apply to these Terms. This does not apply where you are a consumer and the law provides otherwise.

Headings. Section headings are for convenience and do not affect meaning.

Events outside our control. We are not liable for failure or delay in providing a Cloud Feature caused by something beyond our reasonable control. This does not affect Local Use, which does not depend on us.

19. Contact

Windstorm Labs LLC, Eagle Mountain, Utah, USA General: [email protected] · Privacy: [email protected] · Legal: [email protected]