Terms of Service

Who can use Vertebrae. You must be at least 18 years old, or old enough to enter a binding contract where you live, and able to agree to these terms yourself. If you use Vertebrae for an organization, you confirm you are allowed to accept these terms on its behalf.

Signing in. You sign in with Google or Apple, and you are responsible for keeping those sign-ins secure and for everything done through your account. Pick a handle that is yours to use: do not impersonate another person or organization. If you verify a phone number, it must be one you are entitled to use.

Your devices. Your transcripts, summaries and notes live on your devices. If you turn on sync, they travel between your devices end-to-end encrypted with keys only your devices hold. Either way we cannot read them, and we also cannot recover them for you if your devices and their backups are lost. Keeping backups is up to you.

It stays yours. You own your conversations, transcripts, summaries and notes. These terms give us no rights to them beyond what is needed to do what you ask: carry encrypted data between your devices, generate a summary when you request one, store a note you publish, and hold the copy that AI Connections needs while that switch is on. We do not use your content to train AI models and we do not sell it.

You are responsible for it. You confirm you have the right to record, transcribe, store and share whatever you bring into Vertebrae, and that doing so does not break any law or agreement that binds you, including confidentiality obligations to an employer or client.

Feedback. If you send us ideas or suggestions, we may use them to improve Vertebrae without owing you anything for them.

Vertebrae transcribes calls and meetings, and the other people in them have rights too. Many places require the consent of everyone on a call before it is recorded or transcribed, and the rules can depend on where each participant is. You are responsible for knowing the rules that apply to you and for getting whatever consent they require. On calls between Vertebrae users, both sides see a transcription notice for the whole call. On phone calls, and in meetings the Mac app transcribes from your computer’s audio, the other participants get no signal from Vertebrae, so telling them is up to you. It is the right thing to do and often the legally required one. Do not use Vertebrae to record anyone without the consent the law requires.

Published notes. When you publish a note, anyone with the link can read it, use the AI features on its page, and connect software to it. Guard the link accordingly, and do not publish notes that contain other people’s information you are not allowed to share. You choose how long a link lives when you publish, and published notes go away when that time is up. We may take a published note down sooner if it breaks these terms or the law.

AI Connections. Turning on AI Connections keeps a readable copy of your transcripts and summaries on our servers so an agent you approve can read them. You choose which agents to connect and can disconnect any of them, or turn the whole feature off, whenever you like. The agents are made by other companies: what they do with what they read is governed by their terms, not ours, and we are not responsible for it.

No emergency calls. Vertebrae is not a replacement for your phone service. It cannot place calls to emergency numbers such as 911, and you must keep another way to reach emergency services.

Use them properly. Calls you place to regular phone numbers are carried by our telephony partner and are subject to the laws that govern telephone calls where you and the person you call are located. Do not use Vertebrae for unsolicited marketing, automated or bulk calling, harassment, spoofing, or anything else that would be unlawful on an ordinary phone line. We may limit or suspend calling to prevent abuse or to protect the service.

Do not use Vertebrae to do any of the following:

• Break the law, or help someone else break it.
• Harass, threaten or defraud anyone, or record or share someone’s words to harm them.
• Probe, circumvent or interfere with the security of the service, including its encryption, attestation, sign-in or rate limits, or access another person’s account or notes without permission.
• Overload or misuse our servers, including sending automated traffic to the summarization service or the notes viewer at a scale meant for people.
• Resell Vertebrae or offer it as your own service without our written agreement.
• Use Vertebrae from a country under a comprehensive US embargo, or in any way that breaks export-control or sanctions laws.

If someone is misusing Vertebrae toward you, use Report User in the app or write to us, and we will look into it.

Reading the code is welcome: the parts of Vertebrae we publish as open source are yours to study, run and change under their open-source license. These terms cover the service we operate, not the code you run yourself.

Transcription and summarization are produced by AI models, and they make mistakes: words are misheard, speakers are mixed up, and a summary can misstate what was said or leave out what mattered. Treat them as notes, not as a record. Check anything you rely on against the conversation itself, and do not use them as a substitute for legal, medical, financial or other professional advice.

Price. Vertebrae is free to use today. If we introduce paid features, we will say so clearly before you are charged for anything, and purchases made through the App Store are also subject to Apple’s terms.

Changes to the service. Vertebrae is in beta and changes often. We may add, change or remove features, and the apps update themselves to keep you on a current, secure version. We may also stop offering the service altogether. Because your notes live on your devices, they stay with you if we do.

Changes to these terms. When we change these terms we will update the date at the top of this page, and for changes that matter we will tell you in the app or by email before they take effect. Using Vertebrae after a change means you accept the new terms.

By you. You can stop using Vertebrae at any time. Deleting your account in the app removes your account, your published notes, the AI Connections copy if you had it on, and the other records the Privacy Policy describes. What is stored on your devices is yours to keep or delete.

By us. We may suspend or close your account if you break these terms, if the law requires it, or if we need to protect other users or the service. Where we reasonably can, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put things right.

Vertebrae relies on Apple and Google for sign-in, calendar and app distribution, and on a telephony carrier to reach the phone network. Their terms govern their part of the service. We are not responsible for services we do not operate, including the AI agents you connect and the sites you follow links to.

The iPhone app. The iPhone app itself is licensed to you under Apple’s standard Licensed Application End User License Agreement; these terms cover the service behind it. Apple is not a party to these terms and is not responsible for the app or for supporting it.

As is. We work hard on Vertebrae’s security and reliability, and the Privacy Policy describes exactly what we do. Beyond that, the service is provided as is and as available, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement, to the fullest extent the law allows. We do not promise that Vertebrae will be uninterrupted, error-free or accurate.

Limits on liability. To the fullest extent the law allows, Humanlike, Inc. and its people are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost data, profits or goodwill, arising from your use of Vertebrae. Our total liability for any claim related to the service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim or one hundred US dollars. Some places do not allow these limits, in which case they apply only as far as the law permits.

Your responsibility. If a third party brings a claim against us because of content you recorded, published or shared, or because you broke these terms or the law, you agree to cover the resulting costs and damages.

Law and venue. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. If something goes wrong, write to us first and we will try to sort it out. Any dispute we cannot resolve that way will be brought in the state or federal courts located in San Francisco County, California, and you and we agree to their jurisdiction.

Other terms. If Humanlike, Inc. is acquired or reorganized, we may hand this agreement to the company that takes over Vertebrae, and we will tell you if that happens. You may not transfer your account or this agreement to anyone else. If we do not enforce a term right away, we can still enforce it later. If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest still applies. These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement between you and us about Vertebrae.

Write to us at support@vertebrae.ai.