Legal

SrutiAI Terms of Use

Last updated: 26 October 2026 · Version: 1.0

1. About these terms

1.1 These Terms of Use ("Terms") are an agreement between you and Tanwir Adib Chowdhury, an individual in Ontario, Canada, who makes SrutiAI ("SrutiAI", "we", "us"). They govern your use of:

• (a) the SrutiAI desktop application for macOS and Windows, including its updates (the "App");
• (b) the SrutiAI account, licence, quota, feedback and survey services the App connects to, and the dashboard at srutiai.com (together, the "Service"); and
• (c) the AI model files we make available for download for use with the App (the "Models").

These Terms cover SrutiAI for desktop. Any web-based SrutiAI service we may offer in future will have its own terms.

1.2 The App asks you to agree to these Terms, the EULA and the Privacy Policy the first time it opens, before anything else. By agreeing there, or by creating an account, starting a trial or buying a plan, you accept these Terms. If you use SrutiAI for an organisation, such as a university, you confirm you are authorised to accept these Terms for it, and "you" includes that organisation.

1.3 Three documents form part of these Terms:

• the End User Licence Agreement ("EULA"), which licenses the App and the Models to you;
• the Privacy Policy, which explains what personal data we handle and why; and
• the Refund Policy.

If they conflict, the EULA governs the App and the Models, and these Terms govern everything else.

1.4 Who sells your plan. Plans are sold through Stripe Managed Payments, with Stripe (shown at checkout as Link) as merchant of record ("Stripe"). Stripe is the seller of record for your purchase and handles payment, sales tax and VAT, invoices and refunds under its own terms, which you accept when you buy. These Terms govern your use of SrutiAI.

2. What SrutiAI is, and what it does not do

2.1 SrutiAI is a research tool. It transcribes recordings, translates them into English, helps you review and correct the results, and supports qualitative analysis of interviews, field notes, documents, diaries, surveys and literature.

2.2 Processing happens on your computer. The App transcribes, translates, summarises and analyses your material on the device where it is installed. We do not receive, store or have access to your recordings, transcripts, translations, summaries, codes, notes, studies or any other content you create or import ("Your Content"), except where you choose to send something yourself, as described in section 8.

2.3 The App needs the internet in certain moments. It checks your licence each time it opens and about every hour while open, reports the length of each processed recording in whole minutes for your quota, and downloads the Models once. The work itself does not need the internet. Section 6 explains what happens when a check cannot be completed.

2.4 SrutiAI does not make decisions. It produces drafts for a person to review: transcripts, translations, suggested codes, groupings, summaries and draft claims. It is not a substitute for your own reading, judgement or expertise.

3. Eligibility

3.1 You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter a binding contract. SrutiAI is intended for professional, academic and research use.

3.2 You may not use SrutiAI if you are barred from receiving software or services under the laws of your country or under applicable sanctions or export controls (section 15).

4. Your account and licence

4.1 One person per account. An account belongs to one named person. Do not share sign-in details or let another person use your account. You are responsible for activity under your account and for keeping your sign-in method (your Google account, email inbox or password) secure. Tell us promptly at support@srutiai.com if you suspect misuse.

4.2 One computer at a time. A plan runs on one computer at a time. Each installation creates its own random key on first sign-in; signing in on another computer moves the licence there, and the computer it left stops working at its next check. You may move the licence up to 10 times in any 24 hours. Support may move it for you.

4.3 Using the App. Your right to install and use the App and the Models is the licence in the EULA, which also sets out what you may not do with them. You must not use the Service other than through the App or the dashboard, or overload, probe or attack the Service or the model servers.

4.4 Organisations. There are no team or institutional plans yet. Until there are, each plan is bought and held by one person, even where an organisation pays for it.

5. Plans, trials, payment and allowances

5.1 Plans. The plans, their prices and what each includes are shown at srutiai.com/pricing when you buy. Today there are two:

• Local: transcription and translation into English, summaries, related reading and Word export, with up to 5 hours of audio a day.
• Research: everything in Local with no daily limit, plus studies, guided analysis, translation memory, batch import and Labs.

We may change prices for future billing periods with at least 30 days' notice; you can cancel before the change takes effect.

5.2 Trial. A trial lasts 8 days and includes 180 minutes of audio in total, on either plan. A payment method is required to start it. Unless you cancel before it ends, it becomes a paid subscription to the plan you chose and you are charged then. You can start the paid plan earlier, with your explicit agreement. One trial per person: we check this using a one-way hash of your email address, your Google account identifier and the installation.

5.3 Billing. Paid plans renew automatically each month or year until cancelled. Cancelling stops the next renewal; your plan runs to the end of the period you paid for. Plan changes are prorated. If a payment fails, Stripe retries it for up to 7 days, during which the App keeps working; after that the subscription ends. Payment, taxes, invoices and refunds are handled by Stripe (section 1.4) under our Refund Policy. You can manage or cancel your plan from your account page at srutiai.com.

5.4 Processing allowances. Plans include an allowance of processing time, measured in minutes of recorded audio, rounded up to the whole minute per recording. A daily allowance is counted on your computer and renews at local midnight; trial minutes are counted by the Service. A recording that crosses the limit finishes and counts in full; the next is refused until the allowance renews. Importing a transcript you already have does not count. Unused minutes do not carry over and have no cash value.

5.5 Changing plans. If you move to a plan without a feature, such as Analysis, the screens for that feature close, and the App offers that work for export instead. Nothing on your computer is deleted.

6. When the licence cannot be confirmed

6.1 Each time the App opens it must reach the Service to confirm your plan. Once open, it keeps working if the connection drops, for up to 48 hours or until your plan's scheduled end, whichever comes first.

6.2 Export-only mode. If your licence does not allow work (your plan or trial has ended, the licence moved to another computer, the allowance is used up, the App could not confirm your plan, or the App failed its own integrity check), the App switches to export-only mode: you can export everything you have done, including transcripts, translations, summaries, reading lists, each study's analysis and your translation memory, but cannot start new processing. We never delete Your Content when a licence lapses. Renewing, signing in or moving the licence back reopens everything as it was.

6.3 If we stop operating the Service. If we decide to discontinue SrutiAI, we will give you at least 90 days' notice and publish a final version of the App that runs without a licence check, so that you can keep using it and keep working with Your Content. Paid time after the shutdown date is refunded under the Refund Policy.

7. Your Content and your responsibilities as a researcher

7.1 You own Your Content. We claim no rights in it. We do not use it to train models, and we cannot, because we do not receive it.

7.2 You are responsible for the lawful collection and use of Your Content. Interviews and similar material usually contain personal data about other people, often sensitive. Before you record, import or process material with SrutiAI, you are responsible for:

• (a) having every consent, permission, ethics approval and lawful basis required to record, hold and process it, including for any processing you choose to send outside your computer under section 8;
• (b) complying with data protection law as the controller of that data, including the rights of the people in it; and
• (c) the security of the computers, folders, backups and sync services where you keep it.

7.3 We are not your processor for content processed on your computer. Because the App processes Your Content on your device and we do not receive it, we do not act as your data processor for that processing. Where an institution requires a data processing agreement for the account data we do hold (section 4 of the Privacy Policy), contact us.

7.4 Requests from research participants. If a person whose voice or words appear in Your Content contacts us, we will tell them we hold none of it and direct them to you.

7.5 Backups. Backups are files you create and keep. If you save them to a folder synced by a cloud service, that service receives them under its own terms. Losing a backup password makes that backup unrecoverable; we cannot recover it.

8. Optional online features you choose to use

8.1 Some features contact other services, only when you use them:

8.2 Third-party terms. When you use these features, the third party's terms and privacy policy apply to what it receives. We do not control those services and are not responsible for their availability, accuracy or conduct.

8.3 Publisher content. Fetching a paper from its link reads only what the site makes available to an anonymous request. SrutiAI does not bypass paywalls or sign-ins. You are responsible for complying with publishers' terms and copyright for papers you add, fetch or import.

8.4 AI providers under your own account. If you choose to send analysis to an AI provider, by signing in to your account with it or with your own API key, it goes from your computer to that provider directly, never through us. That analysis is then processed on the provider's servers, not on your computer, and the rest of SrutiAI's on-device processing does not apply to it. In addition:

• (a) your contract with that provider governs it, including its fees, data retention and use of your data, which may include using it to train the provider's models, depending on your plan and settings with that provider;
• (b) you are responsible for confirming that your ethics approval, participants' consent and data protection obligations allow it;
• (c) names are replaced only where they appear as speaker or participant names; names spoken inside a passage are not caught;
• (d) the spending cap SrutiAI applies is an estimate made on your computer, not a guarantee from the provider; and
• (e) we may switch a provider route off at any time, for example if its terms change, and the analysis then continues on your computer.

8.5 Connecting your AI account. In Settings, you can connect an account you hold with an AI provider (for example, with "Sign in with ChatGPT") so that guided analysis can use it. This is separate from your SrutiAI account, which only runs your plan. When you connect one:

• (a) you sign in on the provider's own page; we never see your password for it;
• (b) the provider gives the App a token, kept in your computer's secure store, which lets the App send your analysis requests to that provider, counted against your plan's limits there; the token is never sent to us;
• (c) the provider handles what you send under its terms and your account's settings: for example, a personal ChatGPT plan may use conversations to improve OpenAI's models unless you turn that off in ChatGPT's data controls, while business and education workspaces usually do not; check your provider's settings before you send research data;
• (d) we do not see your account, history or anything the provider sends back to the App; and
• (e) you can disconnect the account in Settings at any time, which deletes the token from your computer. Disconnecting does not delete what the provider already received; ask the provider for that.

9. Accuracy of AI output

9.1 Speech recognition, translation and AI analysis make mistakes, sometimes confidently. Error rates vary by language, accent, audio quality and topic, and casual conversational speech is markedly harder than read speech. Summaries, groupings, suggested codes and draft claims can omit, merge or misstate what was said.

9.2 You must review output before relying on it. The App is designed around review: it marks passages for checking and asks you to confirm drafts. Do not publish, cite, or base any decision on SrutiAI's output without checking it against the source.

9.3 No automated decisions about people. You must not use SrutiAI to make decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects on individuals (for example in employment, credit, housing, insurance, healthcare, education or immigration) without meaningful human review.

9.4 Not professional advice. Nothing SrutiAI produces is legal, medical, financial or other professional advice.

9.5 Disclosing AI use. The App can produce a statement of which steps used AI and where they ran. You are responsible for following your institution's, funder's and publisher's rules on disclosing AI use.

10. Acceptable use

10.1 You must use SrutiAI lawfully. In particular you must not use it to:

• (a) record, monitor or track people without the consent or legal authority required, or for covert surveillance;
• (b) process special-category or other sensitive personal data without the rights, authorisations and consents the law requires;
• (c) create content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing or hateful, or that impersonates a person in order to deceive;
• (d) misrepresent AI-generated content as human work in order to deceive; or
• (e) infringe anyone's intellectual property or privacy rights.

10.2 Gemma models. You agree not to use SrutiAI for any use prohibited by the Gemma Prohibited Use Policy (ai.google.dev/gemma/prohibited_use_policy), which forms part of these Terms. The EULA explains the Models' own licences.

11. Feedback, problem reports, surveys and messages

11.1 When you send a problem report, feedback or a survey answer, you send the text you write, the category, and, only if you tick it, a diagnostics block shown to you before sending. Please do not paste interview content into these messages.

11.2 You give us a perpetual, royalty-free licence to use feedback and suggestions to improve SrutiAI, without obligation to you.

11.3 Messages from us. We email you about your account (sign-in links, security, billing and changes to these Terms); Stripe sends receipts and trial reminders. If we send news about SrutiAI, every message will say who it is from and let you unsubscribe in one step.

12. Updates, changes and experimental features

12.1 We may update the App and the Service, add or remove features, and change the Models a feature uses. A change that materially reduces what your paid plan includes during a paid period entitles you to cancel and receive a pro-rata refund for the rest of that period.

12.2 Labs features are experimental, may change or disappear without notice, and are provided as they are.

12.3 We test that each new version of the App opens what earlier versions saved, but you should keep backups.

13. Our intellectual property

13.1 The App, the Service, the SrutiAI name and logo, and our documentation are owned by us or our licensors and protected by intellectual property law. These Terms give you no rights in them except the licence in the EULA.

14. Suspension and termination

14.1 By you. You can stop using SrutiAI and cancel your plan at any time. You can ask us to delete your account (Privacy Policy, section 8).

14.2 By us. We may suspend or end your access to the Service if you materially breach these Terms or the EULA (in particular section 10 and the EULA's restrictions), if required by law, or to protect the Service or other users. Where reasonable, we will tell you first and give you a chance to fix the problem.

14.3 Effect. When access ends, the App enters export-only mode (section 6.2). Your Content stays on your computer. Sections 7, 9, 11.2, 13, 16, 17, 18 and 20 survive termination.

15. Export controls and sanctions

15.1 You must not use, export or re-export SrutiAI in breach of applicable export control or sanctions laws, including by or for a person or country subject to them.

16. Disclaimers

16.1 Except as stated in these Terms, and to the extent the law allows, the App, the Service and the Models are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, including fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy of output, or uninterrupted availability.

16.2 Consumer rights. If you are a consumer, you have legal rights that these Terms do not affect, including, in the UK and EU, the right that digital content and services are of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described.

17. Limitation of liability

17.1 Nothing in these Terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or any liability that cannot be limited by law.

17.2 Subject to 17.1, we are not liable for loss of data, research, work, profits, revenue, opportunity or goodwill, or for indirect or consequential loss. Your Content lives on your computer, and you are responsible for keeping backups of it.

17.3 Subject to 17.1, our total liability arising from or in connection with these Terms in any 12 months is limited to the greater of the fees you paid for SrutiAI in those 12 months and CA$150.

17.4

18. Indemnity (business users only)

18.1 If you use SrutiAI for a business or organisation, you will indemnify us against third-party claims arising from Your Content, from your breach of section 7 or 10, or from your use of a third-party service under section 8. This section does not apply to consumers.

19. Changes to these Terms

19.1 We may change these Terms. For a material change we will give at least 30 days' notice in the App or by email before it takes effect. Once it takes effect, the App asks you to agree to the new version before you can carry on using it. If you do not agree, you can cancel your plan; your work stays on your computer.

19.2 We record which version you agreed to and when, as the Privacy Policy describes.

20. Law and disputes

20.1 These Terms are governed by the law of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada that apply there, and the courts of Ontario have non-exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, you also keep the protection of the mandatory law of the country where you live, and may bring proceedings there.

20.2 Before starting proceedings, please contact us at support@srutiai.com so we can try to resolve the issue.

21. General

21.1 These Terms, the Privacy Policy and the policies they refer to are the whole agreement between you and us about SrutiAI.

21.2 If any part of these Terms is found unenforceable, the rest remains in force.

21.3 You may not transfer your rights under these Terms without our consent. We may transfer them to a successor in a reorganisation, merger or sale, and will tell you if we do.

21.4 We are not liable for delay or failure caused by events beyond our reasonable control.

21.5 If we do not enforce a right straight away, we have not waived it.

21.6 These Terms are written in English. A translation is provided for convenience; the English version prevails, unless the law says otherwise.

22. Contact

Tanwir Adib Chowdhury (SrutiAI), Ontario, Canada · support@srutiai.com · privacy@srutiai.com. Our postal address is available on request.