Terms of Service

The Service is provided by:

Michal Macinka, sole trader (OSVČ)
IČO (company ID) 11824492, registered in the Czech Trade Register
Registered seat: Lhotka 198, 560 02 Česká Třebová, Czech Republic
E-mail: [email protected] (general and support) · [email protected] (personal data)

(“we”, “us”, “Inqui”). We communicate in English and Czech. Consumer protection in the Czech Republic is supervised by the Czech Trade Inspection Authority (Česká obchodní inspekce, coi.gov.cz), personal data protection by the Office for Personal Data Protection (Úřad pro ochranu osobních údajů, uoou.gov.cz).

Inqui lets you practise speaking and writing a foreign language with an AI conversation partner, by text or by voice, within courses, lessons and activities. Depending on your account and settings it also offers corrections and feedback, an estimate of your proficiency level (CEFR), vocabulary and grammar materials, flashcards and quizzes, progress tracking, points and badges. For institutions it offers a dashboard to manage courses, groups and learners.

The Service is free of charge for learners. There are no in-app purchases and no advertising. Institutions that use Inqui for their learners may pay us under a separate written agreement; that does not create any payment obligation for you.

The Service needs an internet connection, a supported device (a current version of iOS or Android, or a current web browser for the dashboard) and, for voice activities, a microphone and your permission to use it. Recordings of your spoken turns are stored as described in the Privacy Policy; in regular use you can switch this off in Settings → Privacy. Data charges from your network provider are your own.

You create an account in the app with your e-mail address, confirmed by a one-time code, or you receive an invitation from your institution. The contract between you and us is concluded when your account is created and you accept these Terms. We keep the accepted version of the Terms on this page; you can save or print it at any time.

• Give accurate information and keep it up to date.
• Keep your login details confidential. An account is personal — do not share it or let someone else use it. Tell us at [email protected] if you suspect misuse.
• You are responsible for what happens in your account unless it was used without your fault.
• Shared demo accounts provided for app-store review or presentations are not personal accounts.

If a school, university, language school or other organisation (“institution”) created your account or enrolled you in its courses:

• The institution is the controller of the course and learning records it uses Inqui for, and we process those records on its behalf as a processor under Article 28 GDPR. The relationship between the institution and us is governed by our agreement with the institution and its data processing agreement (DPA), which take precedence over these Terms in the relationship between us and the institution.
• Authorised teachers and administrators of the institution can see your individual learning records, including progress, mistakes and — depending on their permissions — your conversations.
• The institution decides which courses you see, may assign activities or modes, and may deactivate your access. Questions about how the institution uses your records belong to the institution first.
• These Terms still govern your own use of the Service.

Institutions using the Service (as deployers) undertake to use it only within its intended purpose described in Section 7, to give their learners the information required by law, to secure the legal basis and any parental authorisation required for minors before creating accounts, and to keep human teachers responsible for any assessment of learners.

You may use the Service on your own if you are at least 15 years old. If you are younger, you may use it only with the consent of your parent or guardian, or through a school or institution that has obtained the authorisation required by law. By accepting these Terms you confirm that this condition is met. If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child is using the Service without the required consent, write to [email protected] and we will help.

If you use the Service on behalf of an organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to do so; the consumer-specific provisions of these Terms then do not apply to that organisation.

Use the Service for language learning and teaching. You must not:

• break the law, or use the Service to harass, threaten, demean or harm anyone;
• ask the AI for help with weapons, explosives, drugs, self-harm, violence or other illegal harm, in any framing;
• try to extract the AI’s instructions, make it abandon its role, or bypass its safeguards (“jailbreaking”);
• use the conversation partner persistently as a general-purpose assistant for things unrelated to learning (for example coding or writing assignments for you);
• enter other people’s personal data without a reason, or sensitive data that a practice conversation does not need — invented details work just as well;
• upload or enter content that infringes someone else’s rights or is illegal;
• attack, overload, scrape, reverse-engineer or probe the Service, circumvent rate limits or access controls, or access other users’ data;
• use automated means to create accounts or generate traffic, or resell or commercially exploit the Service without our written agreement;
• pass AI output off as human-written or as an official assessment where that would mislead others.

How we detect and handle breaches is described in Section 14.

The conversation partner, the corrections and feedback, error annotation, the evaluation of activity goals, the CEFR level estimate, translations of course content and the synthetic voice are produced by AI models from third-party providers (see the AI transparency page). You are always talking to an AI, not to a human.

Limitations

• AI output is generated automatically and can be wrong, incomplete, inconsistent, outdated, unnatural or — despite safeguards — inappropriate or biased. A correction may be wrong, and a real mistake may go unnoticed. Speech recognition can mishear you.
• The AI does not give professional advice. Do not rely on it for medical, legal, financial, immigration or other important decisions, even when a role-play is set in such a situation.
• Characters, places and facts in role-plays may be invented. Do not treat them as real.

Intended purpose

The Service is intended for language practice and formative feedback — helping you see your mistakes and progress and choosing suitable practice. CEFR estimates are indicative and formative only. They are not a certified language assessment, are not aligned to or validated against any official examination, and are not equivalent to a language certificate.

The Service, its CEFR estimates, scores, error counts, goal evaluations and other outputs are not intended to be used — and must not be used — to:

• grade learners or decide whether they pass or fail a course, module or examination;
• decide on admission or access to, or assignment to, an educational institution or programme;
• decide on the level of education a person will receive or be able to access;
• certify a person’s language proficiency, including for employment, immigration or visa purposes;
• monitor or detect prohibited behaviour of students during tests;
• take any other decision with legal or similarly significant effects on a person.

Teachers may use what they see in the dashboard as one input for their own professional judgement about what to practise next. An institution that uses the Service or its outputs for any of the purposes listed above does so outside the intended purpose and on its own responsibility, and may thereby take on the obligations that the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) attaches to such uses. Within the Service itself, these outputs only steer which activities are suggested and how difficult they are.

“Your content” means what you type or say in the Service (messages, speech and its transcript, answers to questionnaires and quizzes, saved words and notes). You keep all rights you have in it.

You grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence, limited to what is necessary to provide, secure and support the Service, to store, copy, process and transmit your content — including sending it to the AI providers and other sub-processors named in the Privacy Policy — and to display it to you and, for institutional accounts, to authorised staff of your institution. The licence lasts while your content is stored and ends when it is deleted, except for copies remaining in backups until they expire (see the Privacy Policy). Use of your content in a research study requires your separate research consent. We do not use your content to train AI models, with one exception: unless you switch it off in Settings → Privacy, we store recordings of your spoken turns and may use them to improve the Service and to train our own models that detect speech errors (see the Privacy Policy).

AI output generated for you (replies, corrections, explanations) is provided for your learning; you may use it freely for that purpose. We do not guarantee that output is unique or free of third-party rights.

You are responsible for making sure that the content you enter does not break the law or these Terms.

The Service — its software, design, course materials, texts, illustrations, the Inqui name and logo — is protected by copyright and other rights belonging to us or our licensors. We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the Service for its intended purpose for as long as you have an account. Institutions receive the rights set out in their agreement with us.

Some data and software in the Service come from third parties under their own licences, for example the KanjiVG stroke data and the KANJIDIC2 dictionary data (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike). These Terms do not limit the rights those licences give you. Attributions are listed on the Credits page and open-source licences in the app.

Inqui is also used for research on AI-assisted language learning. Using the Service does not enrol you in any study. Participation is separate and voluntary: before any study data is collected you receive the study’s own participant information and are asked for your separate informed consent. You can refuse or withdraw at any time without giving a reason, and refusing has no effect on your grades or on your access to the Service. While a study runs, the app may assign you a feedback mode, an input mode or an order of activities, as explained in the study information. The study information and consent — not these Terms — govern the research.

We work to keep the Service available and working well, but because it is provided free of charge to learners we do not promise any particular availability (no service-level agreement) except as required by law (Section 12). Interruptions can happen because of maintenance, updates, outages at our AI or hosting providers, or events beyond our control. We announce planned maintenance where reasonably possible.

We develop the Service continuously and may change, add or remove features, courses or content and the AI models we use, if there is a fair reason — for example legal or security requirements, technical development, changes at our providers, improving the learning experience or retiring rarely used functions. Changes are free of charge for you. If a change would affect your access to or use of the Service more than insignificantly to your detriment, we will tell you in text form (e-mail or in-app message) a reasonable time in advance, explain the change and when it takes effect, and you may end the contract free of charge within 30 days of the notice or of the change, whichever is later.

We may discontinue the Service altogether. We will give at least 30 days’ notice and, on request, provide your content in a commonly used machine-readable format.

If you are a consumer, you have the statutory rights that Czech law (in particular Sections 2389a to 2389u of the Civil Code, Act No. 89/2012 Coll., implementing Directive (EU) 2019/770 on digital content and digital services) gives you for the supply of a digital service, to the extent those rules apply — they apply also where you provide personal data instead of paying a price, unless we process the data only to provide the Service or to meet our legal obligations. These Terms do not limit those rights. In particular:

• We are responsible for the Service conforming to the contract, as described in these Terms, throughout the time we provide it to you, and we provide the updates, including security updates, needed to keep it in conformity. Install app updates when they are offered; a defect caused only by not installing an update you were told about is not our responsibility.
• The Service is described honestly in these Terms, including its limits (Section 7). An occasional inaccurate AI correction within those limits is part of how the Service works and does not by itself make it non-conforming; repeated failures of the Service to work as described are defects.
• Report a defect to [email protected]. We will remedy it within a reasonable time, free of charge and without significant inconvenience to you. If we cannot or do not, if the defect reappears, or if it is serious, you may end the contract. Because the Service is free of charge, there is no price to reduce or refund.
• When the contract ends, we will on request give you, free of charge and in a commonly used machine-readable format, content other than personal data that you created in the Service, to the extent the law requires.

You do not need a statutory right of withdrawal to leave: you can stop using the Service and delete your account at any time, free of charge (Section 15).

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits our liability where the law does not allow it — in particular for harm to life, health or other natural rights of a person, for harm caused intentionally or through gross negligence (Section 2898 of the Civil Code), or towards consumers beyond what consumer law permits. If you are a consumer, we are liable to you in accordance with the law.

Within those limits, and especially towards business users: we are not liable for harm caused by your breach of these Terms, by your reliance on AI output contrary to Section 7, by use of the Service outside its intended purpose, by your device, connection or third-party services we do not control, or by events beyond our reasonable control. The liability of an institution and of us towards each other is governed by our agreement with that institution.

Inqui stores content you provide and is therefore a hosting service under the EU Digital Services Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, “DSA”). Your content is not published to other users.

Single point of contact (Articles 11 and 12 DSA)

Authorities of the EU Member States, the European Commission, the European Board for Digital Services and users of the Service can contact us directly and electronically at [email protected]. You can write to us in Czech or English. Messages are read and answered by a person, not only by automated tools.

How we moderate content (Article 14 DSA)

• The rules for what you may enter are in Section 6. The AI conversation partner is instructed to stay in its teaching role and to decline harmful requests.
• Each of your messages in a conversation is automatically screened by the same AI that analyses your mistakes, for jailbreak attempts, requests for dangerous or illegal help, profanity, harassment and persistent off-topic misuse. A flagged message is recorded as an incident (the excerpt, category, severity and a short reason) that we and, for institutional accounts, your institution’s administrators can review.
• An automatic flag does not by itself lead to any sanction. Decisions to restrict content or an account are taken by a person after review. Possible measures are, in proportion to the breach: a warning, removal of specific content, temporary suspension, or termination of the account (Section 15). For institutional accounts we may inform the institution.
• If we restrict your content or account, we tell you the decision and our reasons, the facts it is based on, whether automated means were used, and how to challenge it (Article 17 DSA). You can challenge any decision by replying to that message or writing to [email protected]; a person will review it. You may also use out-of-court dispute settlement or the courts (Section 18).

Reporting illegal content (Article 16 DSA)

Anyone can report content in the Service they consider illegal by e-mail to [email protected]. Please include: an explanation of why you consider the content illegal; where exactly it is (e.g. the account, course or activity and a description or screenshot); your name and e-mail address (not required for reports of child sexual abuse material); and a statement that you believe in good faith that the report is accurate and complete. We confirm receipt, decide promptly, diligently and objectively, and tell you the outcome. If we become aware of information giving rise to a suspicion of a criminal offence involving a threat to someone’s life or safety, we inform the competent authorities.

To report an AI reply that is wrong, offensive or harmful, use the same address (or an in-app report option where your app version offers one). See also the AI transparency page.

You can end the contract at any time, free of charge and without giving a reason, by deleting your account in the app (Profile → Settings → Delete account) or by asking us at [email protected]. What is deleted and what is kept is explained on the account deletion page.

We may suspend or close an account, after review by a person, if the user seriously or repeatedly breaches these Terms, uses the Service unlawfully or puts other users or the Service at risk, or if the law or an authority requires it. Where reasonable we first warn you and give you a chance to remedy the situation. We may also end the contract when we discontinue the Service (Section 11). An institution may deactivate the access it provided.

Provisions that by their nature should survive the end of the contract (for example Sections 8, 9, 13 and 18) continue to apply.

If you downloaded the app from Apple’s App Store, your licence to use the app is also subject to Apple’s Licensed Application End User License Agreement (Standard EULA). These Terms are between you and us, not Apple; we, not Apple, are responsible for the app and its content, maintenance and support and for handling any claims relating to it. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of the Standard EULA and may enforce it against you.

If you downloaded the app from Google Play, the Google Play Terms of Service govern your use of Google Play. Apple and Google are not responsible for the Service.

We may change these Terms for a fair reason, such as changes in the law, in the Service or in our providers’ terms, within a reasonable scope. We will tell you about a change by e-mail or in the app at least 30 days before it takes effect and show the new version on this page with a new version date. If you do not agree, you can reject the change by ending the contract (deleting your account) free of charge before it takes effect. If you continue to use the Service after that date, the new version applies. Changes required by law or purely editorial or technical corrections that do not disadvantage you may take effect sooner.

These Terms are governed by Czech law. If you are a consumer habitually resident in another country, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory provisions of the law of your country (Article 6(2) of Regulation (EC) No 593/2008, “Rome I”), and you may bring proceedings in the courts of your country as well (Regulation (EU) No 1215/2012).

If you have a complaint, please write to [email protected] first — most problems can be solved quickly.

Out-of-court resolution of consumer disputes. If you are a consumer and we do not resolve a dispute arising from this contract by agreement, you may submit it to the body competent for out-of-court resolution of consumer disputes: the Czech Trade Inspection Authority (Česká obchodní inspekce), ADR Department, Štěpánská 15, 120 00 Prague 2, Czech Republic, adr.coi.cz. You must first have tried to resolve the dispute with us, and you must file the proposal within one year of first raising your claim with us.

If any provision of these Terms is invalid or ineffective, the remaining provisions remain in force, and the invalid provision is replaced by one that comes as close as legally possible to its purpose. We may transfer the contract to a successor operating the Service; we will tell you in advance and you may end the contract if you disagree. Failure to enforce a right is not a waiver of it.

These Terms are available in English and Czech. Both versions are binding; if they differ and you are a consumer, the version more favourable to you applies.

Contact: [email protected] · Michal Macinka, IČO 11824492, Lhotka 198, 560 02 Česká Třebová, Czech Republic