Terms of Service

1. About these Terms

These Terms govern your use of Inzwi — the platform at inzwi.app and our WhatsApp bot — to contribute Shona language data. You are asked to accept these Terms before your first recording, and again whenever a new version changes what happens to your voice; nothing you record is stored until you do. If you do not accept them, please do not contribute.

Inzwi is a Zimbabwean-led project that builds open language resources for Shona (chiShona) and other Zimbabwean languages. Our outputs are intended to be used by researchers, developers, students, public-sector projects, and commercial products — so that voice and language AI works for the 15+ million Shona speakers it currently does not.

2. What you contribute

"Contributions" means anything you submit through Inzwi, including:

• Voice recordings — both prompted read-aloud and free-form speech
• Transcriptions of other contributors' clips
• Review verdicts and notes on others' recordings
• Profile metadata you choose to share (dialect, gender, age range)

Inzwi stores your Contributions, processes them (audio normalisation, quality scoring, validation routing), and aggregates them into a structured speech & text corpus.

Your recordings are heard by other contributors who review them, and spoken answers may be transcribed by an administrator. Your voice can identify you even without your name: the corpus carries a speaker code instead of your name, phone number or email, which makes it pseudonymised, not anonymous. The Privacy Policy explains who receives it.

3. Licence you grant Inzwi

You keep ownership of your Contributions. You grant Inzwi a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, non-exclusive licence to:

• Store, process, transcode, and back up your Contributions;
• Use them as training, validation, and evaluation data for speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), translation, and other language-model work;
• Combine them with other Contributions into derived datasets;
• Publish those derived datasets under open licences — including Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) — so third parties (academic and commercial) can use them under the same terms;
• Train, distribute, and license AI models derived from those datasets, including for commercial use;
• Use aggregate statistics and short text snippets for publications, demos, presentations, and grant applications. Example audio clips are used this way only with the speaker's separate permission.

You also grant Inzwi the right to sublicense the above to research partners, hosting platforms (e.g. Hugging Face), and downstream users of the open dataset.

4. Commercial use

Inzwi explicitly supports commercial use of the corpus and the models trained from it. This includes — but is not limited to — Inzwi itself or third parties:

• Training and distributing proprietary or open ASR / TTS / translation models for Shona and other Zimbabwean languages;
• Building voice products (assistants, IVR, accessibility tools, transcription services) on top of those models;
• Licensing the dataset, sub-corpora, or models to other organisations;
• Offering commercial APIs and SDKs derived from the work.

Revenue: Contributors are not entitled to a share of revenue from commercial use of the corpus or derived models. Recognition is delivered through the contribution rewards described in Section 6 and through public attribution in dataset cards and publications.

Personality and voice rights: By contributing voice recordings, you agree your voice may be used to train speech models. You acknowledge that trained models may produce synthetic voice output that shares acoustic characteristics with your voice. We do not attempt to clone individual contributors, and we do not publish recordings tied to your personally identifiable information.

5. Accounts and pre-accounts

Inzwi supports three ways to contribute:

• Web account at inzwi.app — email + password or Google sign-in;
• WhatsApp pre-account — when you first message our WhatsApp bot we create a phone-only contributor record so you can earn points and rewards without a full sign-up;
• Without an account — recordings tied to this browser, which you can later claim by creating an account in the same browser. You accept these Terms before your first recording; until you claim them we cannot tell which recordings are yours, so to withdraw them you first claim them.

You're responsible for the security of your sign-in credentials. Notify us at hello@inzwi.app if you suspect unauthorised use.

6. Points, rewards, and airtime

Inzwi runs a gamified rewards programme to recognise sustained contribution:

• Every accepted contribution earns points;
• Streaks, tiers, and leaderboards track your activity;
• From time to time we run cohorts where top contributors receive airtime, mobile data bundles, or other recognition.

Airtime payouts: Airtime is currently disbursed on Econet only (07-7 / 07-8 prefixes). You may set a payout number that differs from your WhatsApp number. If your WhatsApp line is on another network, you can either supply an Econet number for airtime or skip payouts entirely and continue contributing.

Eligibility: Reward cohorts are funded externally (grants, partners, sponsors). We make no guarantee that any specific reward cohort will run. We reserve the right to disqualify a contributor from rewards in cases of fraud, manipulation of the validation system, or breach of these Terms. Points and rewards have no cash value, are non-transferable, and cannot be converted to money on demand.

7. What we ask you not to do

You agree not to:

• Submit material that is not your own to submit (copyrighted passages, recordings of other people without their consent, AI- generated text or audio passed off as your own voice);
• Submit content that is unlawful, defamatory, threatening, sexually explicit, hateful, or that targets identifiable individuals abusively;
• Submit personally identifiable information about other people (names, ID numbers, phone numbers, addresses) without their consent — Shona examples about "Tendai" are fine; revealing a real Tendai's bank balance is not;
• Game the validation, points, or referral system (multi-accounts, rubber-stamping your own clips, scripted submissions);
• Use bots, scrapers, or automated tools against the platform without our written permission;
• Copy, record, keep or share other contributors' recordings that you hear while reviewing;
• Use Inzwi in ways that violate Zimbabwean law or the law of any jurisdiction you contribute from.

8. Quality, validation, and removal

Contributions go through peer validation and automated quality checks (signal-to-noise scoring, silence trimming, clipping detection, profanity screens). We may reject, edit, or remove Contributions that fail these checks or violate Section 7, at our sole discretion and without liability to you.

You can withdraw your consent at any time, without giving a reason — from Settings on the web or by sending withdraw on WhatsApp. Once an administrator has confirmed the request came from you, your recordings are deleted from our systems and left out of every later dataset. Datasets already shared and models already trained cannot be recalled, and backups age out on the schedule in the Privacy Policy.

9. Age

Inzwi is intended for contributors aged 16 or older. If you are between 13 and 16, please contribute only with the active consent of a parent or guardian. We do not knowingly accept contributions from children under 13.

10. Service availability

Inzwi is provided "as is". We do everything reasonable to keep the platform working, but we don't guarantee uninterrupted availability or freedom from bugs. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Inzwi is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising out of your use of the platform.

11. Termination

You can stop using Inzwi at any time, and withdraw as described in Section 8. We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these Terms — most commonly for Section 7 reasons. The licence you granted Inzwi in Section 3 survives termination for any Contributions that have already been incorporated into a dataset or used in model training.

12. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms when the project evolves. We will publish the new version with an updated version stamp at the top of this page. If a change affects what happens to your recordings, the licence you grant (Section 3) or the rewards programme (Section 6), you will be asked to accept the new version before your next contribution, on the web and on WhatsApp.

13. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Email hello@inzwi.app.