Legal
Terms of Service
The agreement between you and Sayobo. It is short, and written to be read — the parts that actually constrain you are the ones about fair use of the course generator and about the courses being machine-written.
Last updated
These terms govern your use of the Sayobo app and this website. By using either, you accept them. If you do not, don’t use the service — and if something here seems wrong or unfair, write to hello@sayobo.com rather than simply leaving.
Who you are agreeing with
Sayobo is operated by Alberto Acuña, an individual based in Spain. Contact: hello@sayobo.com.
What Sayobo is
Sayobo is an audio language course. Lessons are generated for the language pair you choose — a teacher’s voice in the language you already speak, native voices in the one you are learning — and you practise by answering out loud during the pauses.
Sayobo is free to use, and there is nothing to pay. If that ever changes, you will be told before it affects you, and no charge will be made without your explicit agreement first.
Your account
An anonymous account is created for you when you first open the app; you can later turn it into a permanent one with Google, Apple or an email address.
- Keep your sign-in details to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account.
- Give a real email address if you create a permanent account — it is the only way to recover access.
- One person, one account. Don’t share an account or pass it on.
- If you believe someone else has got into your account, tell us at hello@sayobo.com.
You can delete your account at any time — see how to delete your account.
The courses are written by a machine
This matters enough to have its own section.
Sayobo’s lessons — the scripts, the translations, the pronunciation, the synthesised voices, the tutor’s answers and any custom course you generate — are produced by automated language models and text-to-speech. They are good, and they are not perfect. Expect the occasional wrong translation, unnatural phrasing, mispronunciation or confidently mistaken answer from the tutor.
So: Sayobo is a language course, not an authority. Do not rely on it where getting the language exactly right carries consequences — legal, medical, contractual or safety-related. If you spot something wrong, tell us and it will be fixed on the next regeneration.
What you may and may not do
You may use Sayobo for your own learning, on your own devices, as much as you like. That includes downloading lessons for offline listening.
You may not:
- redistribute, republish, sell or upload the lesson audio, transcripts or summaries anywhere else;
- scrape the service, or use it through anything other than the official app;
- try to break, overload or circumvent the service, its rate limits or its authentication;
- automate course or lesson generation beyond normal personal use. Generating a course costs real money in machine time, and abuse of it is the one thing that will get an account suspended without warning;
- use Sayobo to produce content that is illegal, or that harasses or abuses another person.
Who owns what
The Sayobo name, the site, the app and the course content remain the property of their owner. You get a personal, non-transferable licence to use them for learning, for as long as you keep to these terms.
Custom courses you generate are yours to use in the same way, and they are private to your account — nobody else can see them. Text you write — a question to the tutor, the description of a course — stays yours; you grant only the permission needed to run the service, which is to process it and store it for you.
Availability
Sayobo is offered as it is. There is no promised uptime, and lessons, courses and features may change or disappear as the course improves. Where a change takes something away that you were relying on, reasonable notice will be given.
Because a lesson is written the first time somebody asks for it, a brand-new language pair can take a few minutes to appear, and occasionally a generation fails and has to be retried.
Liability
Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law. Your rights as a consumer under Spanish and EU law stand whatever this document says.
Beyond that, and to the extent the law allows: Sayobo is not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost data where you have not kept your own copy, or for the consequences of relying on machine-generated language content as described above.
Ending it
You may stop using Sayobo whenever you like, and delete your account with it.
Your account may be suspended or closed if you break these terms — for serious abuse immediately, otherwise after being asked to stop. If your account is closed for a reason other than abuse, you will be told why and given a chance to export your progress.
Changes
These terms will change as the service grows. The date at the top of this page changes with them, and earlier versions stay available on request.
Material changes are posted here before they take effect, and sent by email if your account has an address attached. Continuing to use Sayobo after that means accepting the new version; if you would rather not, you can delete your account.
Law and disputes
These terms are governed by the law of Spain.
If you are a consumer resident in the European Union, you keep the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country you live in, and you may bring proceedings in your own country’s courts. The European Commission’s online dispute resolution platform is at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr.
Before any of that, please just write to hello@sayobo.com. Nearly everything is solvable that way.