These Terms of Service ("Terms") are the agreement between you and AiChinese ("AiChinese", "we", "us") covering the AiChinese mobile app and this website (together, the "Service"). They're written to be read, not skimmed past. Questions: nihao@ai-chinese.app.
Accepting these terms
By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you don't agree, please don't use the Service.
Who can use AiChinese
AiChinese is built for a general audience and you must be at least 13 years old to use it. If you're under the age of majority where you live, you may only use the Service with a parent or guardian's permission. The Service is not directed at children under 13 and we don't knowingly collect their data.
Your account and referral-code access
During our staged launch, signing up is invite-gated: you need a valid referral code to create an account. Codes are for you, not for resale, and we may limit, expire, or revoke a code at any time.
- Keep your details accurate — use an email address you actually control, since it's how we verify you and reach you about your account.
- Your account is yours — you're responsible for activity that happens under it. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has access.
- One person per account — don't share, sell, or transfer your account.
The Service and AI-generated content
AiChinese uses AI models to generate much of what you see: lessons and reading passages, conversations with practice partners, example sentences, translations, corrections, and pronunciation feedback and scores. That content is generated automatically and can be wrong — a mistranslation, an unnatural phrase, a definition that misses the sense you meant, a pronunciation score that doesn't match what a person would say.
- Treat AI output as practice material to think about, not as authoritative instruction. Check anything that matters against a dictionary, a textbook, or a human.
- AiChinese is a study tool, not a substitute for a qualified teacher, a translator, or professional advice of any kind.
- We make no promise about exam outcomes. Nothing in the Service guarantees an HSK result, a grade, a certification, or any particular level of fluency.
- Features change. We're actively building AiChinese and may add, alter, or remove parts of the Service.
Your content
You keep ownership of everything you create in AiChinese — the vocabulary you save, notes, written answers, messages to the tutor and practice partners, and voice recordings ("Your Content"). We don't claim it.
- The licence you give us — you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, transmit, and process Your Content, and to share it with the service providers listed in our Privacy Policy, strictly for the purpose of operating the Service and delivering the features you asked for. This licence exists so we can sync your data, generate your feedback, and back it up — nothing else. It ends when you delete the content or your account, apart from copies in routine backups.
- What you may not submit — content that is unlawful, infringing, hateful, harassing, sexually explicit involving minors, or that you don't have the right to upload.
- Moderation — we may remove content and suspend or terminate accounts that break these Terms. We aren't obliged to monitor content, and we don't endorse what users submit.
Pronunciation and voice features
When you use speaking practice, the app records your microphone audio and sends it to our server and to third-party speech providers for transcription and scoring. That's how the feedback is produced. Which providers we use, and how the audio is handled and retained, is set out in the Privacy Policy. Don't record anyone else without their permission, and don't record anything you wouldn't want processed by a provider.
Subscriptions and free access
- There is nothing to pay today. Our launch cohort has free access to Pro features while we build. We'll tell you before that changes.
- Any future paid plans will be sold as in-app purchases through the Apple App Store or Google Play. Those purchases are governed by the store's own terms, and billing, renewal, and refunds are handled by the store, not by us — you manage or cancel a subscription in your App Store or Google Play account settings.
- Free access isn't permanent. We may change what's included in free and paid tiers, with notice for anything material.
Acceptable use
Please don't:
- Break the law, or use the Service to harm, harass, or impersonate anyone.
- Attempt to bypass access controls, referral gating, usage limits, or paid-feature gates.
- Scrape, bulk-export, resell, or redistribute content from the Service, or use it to train a competing model or product.
- Probe, overload, or interfere with the Service or its infrastructure, or use automated tools against it beyond normal app use.
- Reverse engineer the app or its APIs except where that right can't be excluded by law.
Intellectual property
The Service — the app, this site, our software, design, branding, and the 爱Chinese name and logo — belongs to us or our licensors and is protected by intellectual property law. We grant you a personal, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the app for your own language learning. Lesson and practice material generated for you may be used for your own study; it doesn't transfer any rights in the Service itself. Third-party dictionary, lexicon, and font data included in the app remains subject to its own licences.
Disclaimers
The Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement. We don't warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure, or that AI-generated content will be accurate, appropriate, or suitable for your purpose.
Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or lost opportunities, arising from your use of the Service. Our total liability for any claim relating to the Service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or £50.
Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that can't be excluded or limited by law — including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. If you're a consumer, you keep your statutory rights.
Termination
You can stop using AiChinese and delete your account at any time — in the app under Settings → Account, or by following the steps on our account deletion page. We may suspend or terminate your access if you break these Terms, if we're required to by law, or if we discontinue the Service. Sections that by their nature should survive termination — intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, and governing law — do.
Changes to these terms
We may update these Terms as the Service evolves. Material changes will be reflected by a new effective date at the top and, where appropriate, an in-app notice. Continuing to use the Service after a change means you accept the updated Terms.
Governing law
These Terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute, except that if you're a consumer you may also bring proceedings in the courts of the country where you live.