Terms of Service

By creating an account, ordering a book, or using TalkLore in any other way, you agree to these Terms of Service and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, please do not use the service.

These terms form a binding agreement between you and TalkLore. You confirm that you can enter into it and, if you are using TalkLore for an organization, that you are authorized to accept it on that organization’s behalf.

• You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter into a contract.
• You must give accurate account information, keep your password confidential, and tell us promptly if you believe your account has been accessed without permission.
• You are responsible for everything that happens under your account, including orders placed and calls scheduled.
• One account per person. Do not share an account, or let someone else use it to create books, unless they are the collaborator described below.

TalkLore collects stories by phone. You choose a plan, set up a book for someone, and add or accept a set of questions. We then call them on a schedule you control, hold a conversation, and turn what they say into a written answer for each question. You can write answers yourself too, and edit, reorder, polish, illustrate, and add a dedication or an epilogue. When you are ready, we produce the finished book as an eBook and a printed copy and ship it.

TalkLore is a tool for gathering and shaping a person’s own account of their life. We do not verify what anyone says, we do not research facts, and we do not present a book as an official record.

This section matters more than any other. TalkLore calls a phone number that you supply and asks personal questions. Please read it carefully.

• Accuracy of the number. You are responsible for the phone number and email address you provide. Calls go to exactly the number on the book, so check it before the first call.
• How calls work. Calls are placed automatically at the scheduled time in the book’s time zone. A call may include an automated greeting and, if a question is not answered, a limited number of retries before it moves to the next scheduled slot.
• Transcripts, not recordings. Calls are transcribed, and the transcript becomes the story. We do not record or store audio. See the Privacy Policy for what is kept.
• Voicemail. If a call reaches voicemail, automated detection ends the call. Such calls are not transcribed and are not treated as an answer.
• If the interviewer is told they are busy. If the person says they cannot talk, the call ends politely and is rescheduled rather than treated as a missed call.
• Stopping the calls. The person being interviewed can ask us to stop at any time, by telling the interviewer, by emailing us, or by replying to a reminder text. We honor that. Account holders can also pause calls or change the schedule.
• Not for outreach. TalkLore is not a marketing, polling, political, fundraising, collections, or emergency service. Do not use it for automated outreach of any kind to people who have not asked for it.

When you set up a book, you choose whether the person being interviewed can only answer questions or also take part in building the book. If they are set up as a collaborator, they get their own sign-in and can edit their questions, reorder them, write answers, upload images, and open the book’s cover and details. They can also change their call schedule and pause calls.

A collaborator’s actions affect a book you own, so choose that role deliberately. You are responsible for what happens on your book, including changes made by a collaborator you invited.

• Prices. Current prices are shown on our pricing page and at checkout. A book is purchased per book, not as a recurring subscription. Prices may change, but a change never affects an order you have already placed.
• Payment. Payments are processed by Stripe. By placing an order you authorize the charge, and you confirm you are authorized to use the payment method.
• Plans. Different plans include different features and allowances, for example the number of calls a book can receive. The features listed at checkout are the ones that apply to your order.
• Additional copies and upgrades. Extra paperback or hardcover copies and color printing are ordered separately and charged at the time you order them, at the prices shown in the cart.
• Taxes. Prices are shown exclusive of applicable sales tax, which we collect where required.
• Promo codes. Promo codes are single-use unless stated otherwise, have no cash value, cannot be combined unless stated, and may be withdrawn or expire.
• Failed payments. If a payment fails or is reversed, we may pause calls for the book and hold production until it is resolved.

Books are produced on demand and made specifically for you, using content you have approved. Because of that, we are not able to offer refunds once production of a printed book has begun.

• If you cancel before we send the book to production, we will refund the amount you paid for that book.
• If we cannot produce or deliver a book you paid for, we will refund the amount you paid for it, or replace it, at your choice.
• If a printed book arrives damaged or defective, contact us within 30 days of delivery with a photo and we will replace it.
• Nothing in these terms limits any statutory right you have that cannot be waived, including consumer rights that apply in your region.

• On-demand printing. Books are printed by third-party print partners. Paper, ink, color reproduction, and binding can vary slightly between runs and between copies, and colors on screen will not match the printed page exactly.
• Page counts. The length of your book depends on how much is written. We may set minimum and maximum page counts, and we will tell you in the app if a book falls outside them.
• Shipping estimates. Delivery times are estimates, not guarantees, and can be affected by carriers and weather. Shipping availability is shown at checkout.
• Your responsibility for the address. You confirm the shipping address before an order is placed. We are not responsible for a book that cannot be delivered because an address you confirmed was wrong or incomplete. If a book is returned to us, we will contact you and may ask you to cover the cost of reshipping it.
• Risk of loss. Risk of loss passes to you when the carrier marks the package delivered to the address you confirmed.
• Digital copies. Every purchase includes the finished eBook and PDF for your own personal use. You may share them with your family, but you may not sell them or distribute them publicly.

You keep your stories. The questions, answers, transcripts, images, edits, dedications, and epilogues in your book belong to you and to the people who told them. We do not claim ownership of your book.

What you allow us to do. To run the service, you grant TalkLore a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, copy, format, transmit to our service providers, print, and deliver your book content, in each case only as needed to provide the service to you and to keep the service working. This license ends when you delete the content, apart from copies we must keep for legal, accounting, or backup purposes.

What you promise. You confirm that you have the rights to the content you upload, that you have the permission described in “Calls, consent, and the person being interviewed,” and that your content does not infringe anyone’s rights or break any law.

What we own. TalkLore owns the service itself: the software, the interview and question systems, the book layout and design templates, the fonts we license for book production, our name, and our branding. You may not copy, resell, or reverse engineer any of it.

Feedback. If you send us an idea or suggestion, we may use it without restriction or payment to you. We will never publish your family’s stories publicly without your permission.

TalkLore uses automated transcription and automated writing tools, including third-party artificial intelligence services, to turn speech into text, suggest questions, generate chapter titles, and polish drafts. These tools are helpful, and they are not perfect.

• Transcripts can contain errors. Names, places, dates, and numbers are the most common source of mistakes, and a transcript is not a complete or verbatim record of a conversation.
• Suggested titles, questions, and edits are proposals. They may misread the tone of a story, drop a detail, or introduce a detail that was not said.
• We do not guarantee that any automatically produced text is accurate, and we are not responsible for errors that remain in a book you have reviewed and approved.
• You are responsible for reading the final book before you publish or print it. The preview is there for exactly that, and the editing tools are yours to use.

You agree not to, and not to help anyone else:

• Use TalkLore to call or contact someone who has not agreed to be interviewed.
• Upload content that is unlawful, infringing, defamatory, harassing, hateful, sexually explicit, or that you do not have the right to use.
• Impersonate another person, or present a book as written by someone it was not written by.
• Use the service for marketing, robocalls, polling, political outreach, debt collection, or any emergency purpose.
• Attempt to access accounts, data, or systems that are not yours, probe or scan our infrastructure, or interfere with the service or with other customers.
• Scrape, harvest, or bulk-extract content, resell or sublicense the service, or use it to build a competing product.
• Circumvent plan limits, call allowances, page limits, or payment.

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaks these rules, and we may report unlawful activity to the authorities.

We work to keep TalkLore available, but we do not promise uninterrupted service. Calls depend on telephone networks and third-party voice infrastructure, and a call may fail to connect or be interrupted for reasons outside our control. When a call fails, we retry it according to the book’s schedule.

We may add, change, or remove features, and we may set limits on usage to keep the service reliable for everyone. If we discontinue a feature you have paid for and have not yet used, we will offer a replacement, a credit, or a refund for the unused portion.

• You can leave. You may stop using TalkLore and delete your account at any time.
• We can suspend. We may suspend or end your access if you break these terms, if a payment fails, if we are required to by law, or if keeping your account would put the service or another person at risk. Where practical, we will tell you why.
• What happens then. Your access ends and we stop placing calls. We keep and delete information as described in the Privacy Policy. If we end your access because you broke these terms, we are not required to refund amounts already paid, and orders already in production may still be produced and shipped.
• Your book files. Before closing an account, download anything you want to keep. We are not able to restore content after an account is deleted.

TalkLore is provided “as is” and “as available.” To the fullest extent allowed by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error free, that a call will connect, that a transcript will be accurate, or that a book will meet your expectations.

A TalkLore book is a personal keepsake built from one person’s memories. It is not a factual, legal, medical, financial, or genealogical record, and it should not be relied on as one. Nothing in these terms excludes any warranty or right that cannot lawfully be excluded.

To the fullest extent allowed by law, TalkLore will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, or emotional distress, arising out of or relating to your use of the service, even if we have been told such damages are possible.

Our total liability for all claims relating to the service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid TalkLore in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or one hundred US dollars. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

You agree to indemnify and hold TalkLore harmless from claims, losses, and reasonable costs, including legal fees, that arise from content you provided, from a call you asked us to place to someone who had not agreed to it, or from your breach of these terms.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Indiana, without regard to its conflict of law rules. Before filing a claim, please email support@talklore.app with a description of the problem, and give us 30 days to work it out with you.

If we cannot resolve it, you and TalkLore agree to bring any dispute in the state or federal courts located in Indiana, and each of us consents to those courts having jurisdiction and being a proper place to hear the case. This does not prevent either of us from seeking relief in any court that has jurisdiction over the other, and it does not take away any right you have to bring a claim in your local courts where the law gives you that right.

We may update these terms as the service changes. When we do, we change the date at the top of this page. If a change is material, we will notify account holders by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use TalkLore after a change means you accept the updated terms.

• Entire agreement. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and TalkLore about the service, and they replace anything discussed or promised before.
• Severability. If one part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest stays in effect.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision once, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
• Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these terms. We may transfer ours as part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.
• Headings. Section headings are for readability only and do not affect the meaning of these terms.

Questions about these terms? Email support@talklore.app. We would rather answer a question than argue about one.