Terms of Use

Accepting these terms

These terms are between you and Globyskytek LLC, a North Carolina limited liability company that operates Troctor. By downloading or using Troctor you agree to them. If you're using it for an employer, you confirm you're allowed to accept on their behalf. If you don't agree, don't use the app.

Our Responsible Use page forms part of these terms. It goes through the one obligation that actually bites here, which is whose transcripts you are entitled to import, in more detail than this page has room for.

Your licence

We give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and use Troctor on Macs you own or control, for as long as you comply with these terms.

You may not copy, sell, sublicense or distribute the app; reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble it except where the law says you may; remove notices; or use it to build a competing product.

We keep all rights not expressly granted. The software, the name and the brand remain ours. Your files are not covered by any of this: see Your content.

Your account and your key

The beta is invite only. If you are let in you get one licence key, and it activates on up to three Macs. You can release a machine from your dashboard to free a seat for another one.

The key is personal to you. Do not share it, publish it, or use it to hand access to people who were not invited. A key that turns up in public gets revoked.

You're responsible for keeping your credentials safe and for what happens under your account. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has access. Give us accurate information and keep it current.

Acceptable use

Troctor never captures your screen. What it does by default is read the documents you attach to a meeting and the transcript files you hand it, write them into a folder you chose, and answer questions about the meeting you are in, and in that mode it asks macOS for no privacy permission and captures nothing. There is also a live mode that captures a meeting, streams the audio from your Mac to a transcription vendor on an account of ours, and writes a recording of it to your own disk. It is off unless you switch it on, per meeting, and it is unproven.

If you do switch it on, the obligations below apply to the recording as well as to the files, and one thing is worth stating plainly rather than burying: whether to tell the other people in a meeting that it is being transcribed is your decision and your legal exposure, not ours. Nothing in the product signals it to them, no operating system feature does either, and in several jurisdictions their consent is required. Switching live mode on is you deciding you have the right to.

The obligations in this section are otherwise about the files. Before you import a transcript, you must have had the right to the recording it came from, and you must have the right to retain and process it now. Troctor cannot check either of those things and does not try. It reads what you give it.

• Do not import a transcript of a conversation that was recorded without the consent the law required at the time. Converting it to Markdown does not cure that.
• Do not import a transcript of a conversation you were not a party to and were not authorised to receive, whoever forwarded it to you.
• Do not import material you are contractually or professionally barred from holding or processing, including material belonging to a former employer, or to a client whose engagement has ended and whose files you were meant to return or destroy.
• Do not use Troctor to process the product of an interception, or to build a searchable archive of somebody else's conversations.
• Do not use it to break the rules of an examination, certification, licensing body or employer.
• Do not use it to commit fraud, to harass anyone, or to break any law that applies to you.
• Do not use it to infringe someone else's intellectual property, or to break a confidentiality obligation you are under.
• Do not resell access, use one key beyond the machines it allows, or attempt to circumvent the rate limits on our licence and download endpoints.

Recording law varies, and it follows the file. In many US states and many countries every participant must consent before a conversation is recorded, and under GDPR participants generally have to be informed. Those rules attach to the recording, so they still apply to the transcript that came out of it and to your possession of that transcript today. You are responsible for knowing and following the law where you and the other participants are. Responsible Use covers this properly.

Your content

Your transcripts, your vault and anything you write in it are yours. We claim no ownership, no licence and no right to use them for any purpose, including training a model.

That is a description of the architecture as much as a promise. Your vault is a folder of plain Markdown files with YAML frontmatter, on a disk you chose. The search index is derived from those files and sits in the app's own folder on the same machine. Neither is ever uploaded, and there is no upload step in the app to trust us about, so we have no copy in which to claim a right. Troctor writes only inside the sections it created, so anything you add by hand survives a reindex.

Because the format is plain text, the files open in Obsidian, VS Code or TextEdit with or without Troctor installed. Delete the app and your notes are still sitting there. Nothing of yours is held inside a format only we can read, and the ownership claim is therefore something you can check rather than something you have to take on faith.

You are responsible for having the right to hold and process everything you put through Troctor, including anything confidential belonging to an employer or a client. Acceptable use above sets out what that means in practice.

Third-party models

Troctor does not run a model of its own. When you ask a question, your question, whatever you attached to that meeting, what has been said in it and its recent messages are sent to a model. There is one route, and it is the same for every model on offer.

The request goes to our backend, which forwards it to the model vendor that answers the model you picked, on an account of ours. We relay it and store none of it. There is no configuration in which the app reaches a vendor directly: it holds no vendor key, and the ability to supply one has been removed.

Your entitlement is an allowance rather than a purchase. It is 200 credits per licence per day, an answer costs between one and eight of them depending on the model, and it resets at midnight UTC. It is provided as part of the beta rather than sold, and we may change the models on offer, change what each costs, change the allowance or withdraw it. We will say so on the pricing page when we do.

The vendor's terms govern what happens to your question after it arrives, and they are worth reading. The privacy policy names the current vendors and sets out what is written down.

Model output can be wrong, and it can be confidently wrong. Troctor gives you answers to check, not advice, and it is not a substitute for professional judgement in legal, medical, financial or any other regulated matter. Verify anything that matters against the passage it cites before you act on it.

One part of the design exists to narrow that risk rather than to paper over it: citations are built from what retrieval actually returned rather than parsed out of the model's reply, so a source that was never retrieved cannot be cited. There used to be a second. Retrieval was scored before a model was called at all, and below a confidence floor Troctor declined to answer. That gate was removed in v0.1, because on a small vault it refused far more often than it protected. The model is now called every time you ask, and the instruction to answer with what is there and say how thin it is lives in the prompt rather than in the code. Neither mechanism makes an answer correct, and neither moves responsibility for acting on one away from you.

What it costs

Nothing. The private beta is free and invite only.

There is no payment processor in this product, no card details, no subscription, no trial timer, no invoice and no renewal, because there is nothing to bill. The only licence plan that exists is beta. Nothing you do in the app can start a charge, because there is no mechanism that could take one.

Model tokens and transcription are the things that cost money, and both are on our accounts. Answers run against a daily allowance of credits, and live mode against a daily allowance of transcription minutes. Both cost you nothing, and when either is spent Troctor says so and stops until it resets, rather than charging you or asking for a key.

Troctor will not be free forever. When there is something to charge for we will publish the pricing on the pricing page and give account holders notice by email before anything is charged. A beta licence will not quietly become a paid subscription: we hold no payment method that would let it.

Beta software

Troctor is in beta. It will have defects, behaviour may change between builds, and features may be added or removed. Beta builds are provided as-is, and we would ask you not to rely on them for anything critical.

Access is at our discretion. We may decline an invitation request, and we may end the beta or withdraw a licence, though your vault is unaffected either way because it is your own folder of your own files.

Availability

Troctor runs on your Mac and most of it works with the network switched off. Importing, parsing, indexing, searching and opening citations all happen locally and need no connection at all. Two steps need one: generating an answer, which always goes through our backend to a vendor, and live mode, which sends audio to a transcription vendor.

Two things of ours can be unavailable: this website and the dashboard, and the licence service the app checks in with. We aim to keep both up, but we don't promise any particular level of availability. Maintenance, provider outages and events outside our control all happen. A failed check-in does not disable the app or lock you out of your vault, because those are your files on your disk and taking them away over a server outage would be indefensible.

If the vendor behind the model you selected has an outage, or our backend does, or your own connection drops, you won't get generated answers until it returns. Troctor says so and suggests trying a different model, since the models on offer sit behind three different vendors. Everything else in the app keeps working.

Disclaimers

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Troctor is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory, including fitness for a particular purpose, merchantability, accuracy and non-infringement.

Specifically, we do not warrant that an answer will be accurate or complete, that retrieval will surface every relevant passage, that Troctor will say it does not know when it does not know, or that every file you throw at the importer will parse cleanly. Nor do we warrant that free answers will be available at any particular moment: they depend on a vendor we do not control and on an allowance we set. The known limitations on the security page set out what we already know to be true here, and we would rather you read that list than discover it.

Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, revenue, data, or business opportunities, arising out of your use of Troctor.

Our total aggregate liability for any claim relating to Troctor is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or one hundred US dollars. During the beta the first of those is zero, so in practice the figure is one hundred US dollars.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Some jurisdictions don't allow certain exclusions, in which case those parts don't apply to you.

Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from your use of Troctor in breach of these terms or of any applicable law, including recording, privacy, data protection and confidentiality law, and including any claim arising from a transcript you imported that you were not entitled to hold or to process.

Termination

You may stop using Troctor and close your account whenever you like. We may suspend or terminate access if you materially breach these terms, if we're required to by law, or if we discontinue the product.

On termination your licence ends and the app stops activating on new machines. Your vault and your index stay exactly where they are, on your disk, and remain yours. We never held a copy, so there is nothing on our side for us to withhold or for you to retrieve.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of North Carolina, United States, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. The state and federal courts located in North Carolina have exclusive jurisdiction, except that either party may seek injunctive relief in any competent court. If you're a consumer, this doesn't deprive you of protections you're entitled to at home.

Changes

We may update these terms. If a change is material we'll update the date above and notify account holders before it takes effect. Continuing to use Troctor after that means you accept the revised terms.

Contact

Write to legal@troctor.com, or Globyskytek LLC, #2150, 207 W Millbrook Road, Suite 210, Raleigh, NC 27609, United States.