Terms of use

What this is

These terms cover your use of the LuxVoice app for Android. Installing it or using it means accepting them. If you do not accept them, do not install it — and if you already have, uninstalling it ends this agreement with nothing left owing on either side.

You are given permission to use the app on devices you control, for your own purposes, personal or professional. That permission is not exclusive and cannot be transferred. The app itself, its design and its code remain ours.

You need to be old enough, where you live, to agree to terms like these on your own behalf. If you are not, an adult responsible for you has to agree to them for you.

What it is not

LuxVoice is a machine translator and a speech tool. It is not a certified, sworn or official translation service, and nothing it produces is a certified translation. Where an authority, an employer, a court or a school asks for a certified or sworn translation, this app cannot provide one and its output must not be handed in as one.

That matters more for Luxembourgish than it would for most languages, because Luxembourgish turns up in official business — a letter from a commune, a form, an application. The app is here to help you understand what is in front of you and to hear how a phrase actually sounds. It is not here to produce the document you hand back.

It is also not advice. Do not rely on it for anything legal, medical, financial or safety-critical, and do not use it in an emergency. Where the meaning of something matters, have a person who speaks the language confirm it.

Transcription is not a recording service and what it writes down is not a record. It is there so you can see what you actually said and work on it; it is not a transcript anyone should rely on as evidence of what was said, by you or by anybody else.

What a translation is worth

Translations are produced by machine translation services rather than by people. Luxembourgish has far less material behind it than English, French or German, so the app is at its best on everyday phrases and least reliable on idiom, technical vocabulary, names, and anything where a small change of wording changes the meaning.

The Luxembourgish that comes back is corrected automatically before you see it, which removes a class of spelling and grammar mistakes the underlying services make. That is a real improvement and it is not the same as being right: a correctly spelled wrong sentence is still a wrong sentence.

The spoken voice is a synthesised one. It is a good guide to the rhythm of a phrase and it is not a native speaker, so treat it as something to learn from rather than as the last word on how a word is said.

What you send, and where it goes

Translation, speech and transcription are produced by services on the internet, not on your phone. So the text you translate, the text you ask the app to read aloud and the audio you record are all sent away to be processed, and the app cannot do any of it without that. The privacy policy sets out where each one goes and who runs it; what follows is the part of it that is an instruction rather than a disclosure.

Do not put confidential or sensitive information into the app. A phrase you translate may be kept by our service and reused when the same phrase is asked for again, and our operational records may include it. None of it is tied to you, because there is no account to tie it to — but not tied to you is not the same as not kept, and anything you type should be treated as having left your phone.

Only submit text and audio you are entitled to submit. If it belongs to somebody else — a letter about a third person, a recording of someone who did not agree to being recorded — sending it away to be processed is your decision and yours to answer for.

Your words, and what you do with the output

What you type stays yours. We claim no ownership of it, we do not use it to advertise to you, and we do not sell it to anyone.

A translation the app gives you is yours to use — in a message, a note, a piece of homework, something at work. We put no restriction on that beyond the one already stated: do not present it as a certified or professionally checked translation, because it is neither.

Audio you download is saved to your own Music folder and is your file from that moment. What you do with it is up to you, and uninstalling the app does not take it away.

Using the service fairly

The translation and speech behind the app cost money for every phrase, and we pay for them so that the app can be free. The app is the intended way to reach them, and these limits are what keep it free:

• Reach the service through the app. Do not call it from a script, another app, a website or a client of your own.
• Do not work around the length limit, the request limits or any other cap the app or the service applies.
• Do not translate at volume — bulk text, whole documents, or anything automated.
• Do not decompile, modify or redistribute the app, and do not extract the addresses or credentials it uses.
• Do not interfere with the advertising that pays for it, or produce ad activity that is not genuine use.

We may rate-limit, block or stop serving a client that does any of this, and we may do it without warning. The alternative is a bill that ends the free app for everybody using it properly.

Availability

Nothing in the app works without a connection. Translation, speech and transcription all happen elsewhere, so offline the app has nothing to fall back on but the phrases it has already cached on your phone.

One of the services it depends on is not ours. Luxembourgish speech and transcription come from Sproochmaschinn.lu, which we do not run and cannot make promises about. While it is unavailable, those parts of the app are unavailable too.

We may change the services behind the app, change what it can do, stop publishing updates, or remove it from Google Play at any time. A copy already installed keeps working for as long as the services it calls keep answering, and there is no account to close.

How the app is paid for, and that this can change

The app is free to download and every feature in it is free to use. There is no subscription, no pro version and nothing behind a paywall. It is funded by advertising shown inside the app, served by Google, and what Google collects in order to do that is set out in the privacy policy rather than here.

You can also choose to watch one short video advertisement and have advertising switched off for a while. That is an offer rather than a requirement: it is made on the same terms whatever you answered in the advertising consent form, and declining it costs you no feature.

The advertising also pays for the translation and the speech, which cost us money every time you use them. That is the plain reason the limits in the section above exist, rather than a legal formality.

We may change how the app is funded in a future version — by changing or removing advertising, or by introducing paid features. If we do, the change arrives in an app update, this page is updated with it, and the privacy policy and the app’s Data safety information on Google Play are updated at the same time if what is collected changes. Nothing you have already installed starts costing money.

What we are responsible for

The app is provided as it is. We do not promise that it is free of defects, that it will always be available, or that a translation it returns is accurate, complete, or suitable for what you mean to do with it.

We are not liable for a loss that follows from relying on a translation, a transcription or a pronunciation the app produced — a message misunderstood, a form filled in wrongly, an application refused, a conversation that went badly, or a document handed in where a certified translation was required. That is the whole reason the sections above say plainly what this is not.

We are not liable for the services the app depends on. If Sproochmaschinn.lu or a translation provider is slow, unavailable or simply wrong, that is outside what we control, and the app can only pass on what it is given.

None of that touches the rights you have as a consumer. Nothing on this page excludes or limits any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, and for fraud. Where the law of your own country gives you rights that these terms appear to reduce, your rights win and this paragraph is the one that governs.

You have paid us nothing: there is no account, no subscription and nothing to buy. Where a limit on liability applies and the law allows one to be set, it is the amount you have paid us for the app, which is nothing.

Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. When we do, the date at the top of this page changes, and the change takes effect for the version of the app released alongside it.

It does not take effect for the copy already on your phone. That version keeps behaving the way it did when you installed it and stays governed by the terms it shipped under, so you are not bound by a change simply for carrying on using what you already have. A change reaches you only through an update, and you can decline an update or uninstall the app. Continuing to use the app after you have installed an update is what indicates that you accept the terms that came with it.

The services behind the app are the exception to that, and it is worth being honest about it: they are updated on their own and a translation returned today can differ from the one the same phrase returned last year. We change them to make the Luxembourgish better, and a change there does not need an app update to reach you.

Contact

Questions about these terms go to the address on our contact page. If a translation came back wrong in a way that matters — a phrase the app gets wrong every time, or Luxembourgish a speaker would not recognise — that is worth telling us and we would rather hear it than not.

The other documents

• LuxVoice privacy policy

  What the app does with your information. These terms are the agreement; that is the disclosure.

• Website terms

  These cover the app. Those cover this site, which is a different thing entirely.