Terms of use — Etch
These terms are an agreement between you and NeoVetta LLC
(“NeoVetta”, “we”, “us”), a California limited
liability company, covering the Etch Android app (com.neovetta.etch).
Installing or using Etch means you accept them. If you do not, do not use the app.
Etch is a voice notebook that runs on your phone. There is no NeoVetta account and no NeoVetta server. We cannot see your recordings, your transcripts, or anything you do in the app. That is a deliberate design choice, and it shapes this whole document: most of what follows is about what you are responsible for, because there is very little we are in a position to do on your behalf.
How the app handles data is covered separately in the privacy policy, which is part of these terms.
1. Who can use Etch
You must be old enough to enter a binding contract where you live. If you are under 18, a parent or guardian has to agree to these terms for you. You must not use Etch if a court order, a law, or the terms of Google Play bar you from doing so.
2. What you may do with the app
We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use Etch on devices you control, for as long as these terms hold. That is a licence, not a sale of the software itself — NeoVetta keeps ownership of the app and everything in it.
You may not:
- Redistribute, resell, rent, or sublicence the app.
- Reverse-engineer, decompile, or disassemble it, except to the extent that applicable law expressly says you may despite this clause.
- Remove or obscure any notice inside the app — including the accuracy disclaimer appended to copied and exported text.
- Use it to break the law, including the recording laws described below.
Etch is distributed through Google Play, and Google’s own terms apply to the download and the payment alongside these.
3. Recording other people is your responsibility
Recording laws vary by state and by country, and breaking them can be a crime. Some places let one participant record a conversation. Others require every participant to consent — California, where NeoVetta is based, is one of them: recording a confidential communication without everyone’s permission is an offence under Penal Code section 632, and it does not matter that the recording never left your phone.
By using Etch to record, you represent and warrant that:
- You have every consent and permission the law where you are requires, from everyone who can be heard.
- You are not recording anywhere or anything you are barred from recording — a courtroom, a school, a workplace with a policy against it, a medical or legal setting that forbids it.
- You will handle what you record in line with any duty you owe the people in it, including confidentiality and professional obligations.
Etch keeping your audio on the device is a privacy feature, not permission to record. It means we cannot see your recordings. It says nothing about whether you were allowed to make them. Those are separate questions and only one of them is ours to answer.
The app asks you to acknowledge this before first use. That acknowledgment does not replace this section, and neither one makes an unlawful recording lawful.
4. Transcripts can be wrong
Etch transcribes using a small speech model running on your phone. It mishears specialist language — drug names and dosages, medical and legal terms, unfamiliar names, new technology. It can turn “no pain” into “pain”, which reverses the meaning while reading perfectly fluently. It can produce confident text that nobody said. Optional AI summaries are generated by a third-party model and can add errors of their own, on top of any already in the transcript.
Etch is not a medical, legal, financial, or official record, and it is not advice of any kind. Your audio stays on the phone precisely so you can go back and check it. Check it before you rely on anything the app produced — and always before a decision where being wrong would matter.
Decisions you make from what Etch produces are yours. So is anything that follows from them.
5. Your content
Your recordings, transcripts, notes, summaries, and tags are yours. We claim no rights in them and we have no way to reach them: they live in app storage on your device and never touch a NeoVetta system.
The other side of that: we cannot recover anything for you. There is no backup on our end. Deleting a recording in the app, uninstalling, losing the phone, or clearing app data destroys the content permanently. If a recording matters, export it yourself.
6. Third parties you choose to involve
Etch talks to services we do not run, and only these:
- Hugging Face, once, to download the speech model on first run.
- An AI provider you configure yourself — OpenRouter, OpenAI, xAI, Ollama, a machine on your own network, or any other OpenAI-compatible endpoint you point Etch at. This is optional and off until you set it up. When it is on, Etch sends transcript text only, never the audio.
- Google Play, for distribution and payment.
Each of these is governed by its own terms and privacy policy, not by ours. We do not control them, we are not responsible for them, and we cannot see what they do with what you send. In particular, we cannot tell whether a given AI provider stores your transcripts or trains on them — and free models are commonly free precisely because the provider may do both. Choosing a provider is your decision, and everything that follows from that choice is between you and them. If a transcript is confidential, use transcript-only mode, or point Etch at a model running on hardware you control.
7. Price, payment, and refunds
Etch is a paid app sold through Google Play. Google, not NeoVetta, takes the payment and is the merchant of record, so refunds go through Google Play under Google’s refund policy. We cannot issue one. If something is wrong with the app, write to us anyway — we would rather fix it — but the refund itself is Google’s to give.
The price is one-off. There is no subscription and nothing renews. If you set up an AI provider, anything that provider charges is between you and them and has nothing to do with the price of the app.
8. Changes, and the end of the app
We may change, add, or remove features in future versions, and we may stop publishing Etch altogether. If we do, the copy already installed on your phone keeps working as long as your device and Android version allow — nothing about Etch depends on us staying online, because nothing about Etch depends on us at all.
We may also update these terms. The current version always sits at neovetta.com/etch/terms with its version number and effective date at the top. If a change is material we will ask you to acknowledge it in the app. Continuing to use Etch after a change means you accept the updated terms; if you do not, uninstall the app.
9. Disclaimer of warranties
ETCH IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”, WITH ALL FAULTS AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, NEOVETTA DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, AND STATUTORY, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.
WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT ETCH WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE, THAT ANY RECORDING WILL SUCCEED OR SURVIVE, OR THAT ANY TRANSCRIPT, TITLE, NOTE, SUMMARY, OR ACTION ITEM WILL BE ACCURATE, COMPLETE, OR FIT TO RELY ON. TRANSCRIPTION AND AI OUTPUT ARE KNOWN TO CONTAIN ERRORS, INCLUDING ERRORS THAT REVERSE THE MEANING OF WHAT WAS SAID.
Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain implied warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing here limits any right you have under consumer protection law that cannot be waived by agreement.
10. Limitation of liability
TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, NEOVETTA WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF DATA, RECORDINGS, PROFITS, REVENUE, GOODWILL, OR BUSINESS, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO YOUR USE OF ETCH — INCLUDING ANY DECISION YOU MAKE ON THE BASIS OF A TRANSCRIPT OR AI SUMMARY, AND ANY CLAIM ARISING FROM A RECORDING YOU MADE.
NEOVETTA’S TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS RELATING TO ETCH WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF THE AMOUNT YOU PAID FOR THE APP IN THE TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE CLAIM AROSE, OR TWENTY-FIVE US DOLLARS.
These limits apply even if a remedy fails of its essential purpose, and they are a fundamental part of the bargain: Etch is sold once, cheaply, and could not be offered on these terms without them.
They do not, and are not intended to, exclude anything the law does not let us exclude. Under California Civil Code section 1668, a contract cannot exempt anyone from responsibility for their own fraud, wilful injury, or violation of law, and nothing in this document attempts to. Liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, and for anything else that cannot be limited under applicable law, is excluded from these limits. Where a limit is unenforceable, it is reduced to what the law allows and the rest of this section stands.
11. Indemnity
You will defend and indemnify NeoVetta against claims brought by someone else that arise from your use of Etch — most obviously, a claim by a person you recorded. This does not cover claims arising from our own wrongdoing.
12. Ending this agreement
You can end it at any time by uninstalling the app. We can end it if you breach these terms, though in practice we have no mechanism to reach into your phone and no wish to. Sections 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, and 13 survive the end of this agreement.
13. Governing law and where disputes go
These terms are governed by the law of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute arising from them or from Etch goes to the state or federal courts located in California, and you and NeoVetta each consent to those courts. Nothing here stops you from bringing a claim in your local small claims court if it qualifies, and nothing here takes away a mandatory consumer-protection right you hold where you live.
These terms contain no arbitration clause and no class-action waiver. That is deliberate. A badly drafted arbitration clause is worse than none at all, and we would rather have neither than have one we could not stand behind.
14. The rest
- These terms and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between you and NeoVetta about Etch, and replace anything said before.
- If a provision is held unenforceable, it is narrowed to what is enforceable, or severed, and everything else stays in force.
- Not enforcing something once does not waive it.
- You may not assign these terms. We may assign them to a successor to the business.
- Nothing here creates a partnership, employment, or agency relationship.
15. Contact
Questions about these terms, or about anything Etch does:
NeoVetta LLC