Tymbr
Terms of service
Tymbr is in an invited early-access phase. Features and pricing may change before general release, subject to the notice and refund rights set out below.
1. Who we are
Tymbr is a transcription service. You record or upload audio, and we turn it into a transcript that shows who said what. The service is run by a sole proprietor in South Africa. The details below are given under section 43 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act.
| Full name | Gareth Saul, trading as 20 East |
|---|---|
| Legal status | Sole proprietor, South Africa |
| Physical address | 18 Lyndhurst Road, Kenilworth, Cape Town, 7708 |
| Telephone | no telephone line; email hello@tymbr.dev for questions and complaints |
| hello@tymbr.dev | |
| Website | https://tymbr.dev |
| Prices | Shown in rand, including VAT where applicable, on the pricing page and again before you pay |
| Codes of conduct | We are not a member of a self-regulatory body |
In these terms, "we" and "us" mean Gareth Saul trading as 20 East. "You" means the person who holds a Tymbr account. You agree to these terms when you buy credit.
2. Terms that limit our responsibility and place obligations on you
Please read this section before you buy credit. It contains every term that limits what we are responsible for, shifts risk to you, or asks you to confirm something. The Consumer Protection Act requires us to point these out clearly, so they are all here in one place. The purchase screen asks you to accept this section specifically. You agree to these terms when you buy credit.
What you confirm and take responsibility for
- You are the responsible party under the Protection of Personal Information Act for everything inside your recordings. You decide what to record, whom to record, and what to do with the transcript. We are your operator and act only on your instructions.
- You have a lawful basis to record every conversation you upload. Section 4 of the Regulation of Interception of Communications Act lets a party to a conversation record it. Recording a conversation you are not part of, or one that a law, a court order, or a professional rule says you may not record without consent, is your responsibility alone.
- You have told the people you record where the law or your professional rules require it, and you follow any rules that apply to your profession, such as those for attorneys, medical practitioners and financial advisers.
- Every person whose voiceprint you enrol has given you explicit, informed consent, in writing or on a recording, to have their voiceprint created and stored under your account. You keep evidence of that consent, you delete the voiceprint when they withdraw consent, and you do not enrol anyone under 18. Voiceprints are special personal information under section 26 of POPIA, and the consent under section 27(1)(a) is consent that you obtain.
- Transcripts are machine-generated and may be wrong. You check every transcript before you rely on it for anything legal, financial, medical, or contractual. We give no warranty that a transcript is accurate, complete, or attributes speech to the right speaker.
- You may connect a Google account only if you have the rights and permissions needed to let Tymbr import, retain and use its calendar and Meet data as described below. Being able to access a transcript does not necessarily mean you own it or may share it.
- You choose the agents and integrations that receive access to your account. Before sharing Google data, you must confirm that the recipient will use it only for the feature you requested and comply with Google's Limited Use restrictions. Your choices do not remove our own obligations under those restrictions.
- You answer requests from people in your recordings who want to see, correct or delete their information. We forward any request we receive to you.
Indemnity
You indemnify Gareth Saul trading as 20 East against all claims, complaints, regulatory fines, losses and costs, including legal costs on the attorney-and-client scale, that arise from your recordings, your voiceprint enrolments, your breach of these terms, your use of agent or API access, or any claim by a third party that you recorded or processed them unlawfully. This means you will cover those costs if they happen.
What we do not promise
- Tymbr is provided as it is, to the extent the Consumer Protection Act allows. It is in early access. We do not promise uninterrupted or error-free service.
- We may change or withdraw features on 14 days' notice by email.
- We never listen to, review, or use your recordings except to run the service for you, and we do not check whether you had the right to make them.
Limits on our liability
- To the maximum extent the Consumer Protection Act allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of business or profit, or loss of data caused by your own deletion or by events beyond our reasonable control.
- Our total liability to you for all claims together is limited to the amount of credit you bought in the 12 months before the claim arose.
- These limits do not apply to loss caused by our gross negligence or wilful misconduct, to death or injury caused by our gross negligence, or to anything else the Consumer Protection Act or POPIA says we cannot exclude. Nothing in these terms takes away a right those Acts give you.
Suspension without refund
If we suspend or close your account because we reasonably believe you recorded unlawfully or enrolled a voiceprint without consent, credit you have already used is not refunded, and unused credit is not refunded either. Section 12 explains this.
3. Who can use Tymbr
You must be 18 or older, or be using Tymbr for a business you are authorised to act for. If you use Tymbr for a business, you confirm that you may accept these terms on its behalf, and "you" includes that business.
4. Your account
You sign in with a verified Google identity. You can link additional Google identities to the same Tymbr account. Each identity grants its own calendar and Meet permissions. Everything you store in Tymbr is kept within that Tymbr account and is not visible to another account.
Keep your sign-in method secure. If you connect the desktop recorder, it receives a device credential that you can name and revoke at any time from the web app. Anything done through your account or your credentials counts as done by you until you tell us otherwise. Tell us straight away at hello@tymbr.dev if you think someone else has used your account.
5. Prepaid credit
Buying credit
Tymbr is prepaid. You buy credit in rand at the prices displayed at purchase. There is no subscription, no monthly fee and no automatic renewal. Payment is processed by Yoco (Yoco Technologies (Pty) Ltd, South Africa). We never see your full card details.
Using credit
Credit is used per minute of audio processed, rounded up to the next minute for each recording. The rate per minute is shown before you buy and again before you start a transcription. Because your credit is held in rand, the rate can change for future transcriptions as our own costs change, but credit you have already spent is never re-priced. Failed transcriptions are not charged. If we charge you in error, we will put the credit back.
How long credit lasts
Under section 63 of the Consumer Protection Act, prepaid credit does not expire until you have used it or three years have passed since you bought it, whichever comes first. We will show you the expiry date of each purchase in your account. We will not shorten this period.
Cooling-off and refunds
If you bought credit online, you may cancel within seven days of purchase and receive a refund of any credit you have not yet used, as section 44 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act allows. Credit you have already spent on transcription cannot be refunded, because the service was delivered with your consent. Outside the seven-day window, unused credit is not refundable except where section 10 or section 12 says otherwise.
6. Lawful recording and acceptable use
You are responsible for the audio you bring to Tymbr. Uploading a recording is your instruction to us to process it. We do not check whether you had the right to make it, and we rely on the confirmations in section 2.
Other people's voices and words in your recordings are their personal information. When you process that information through Tymbr, you are the responsible party under POPIA and we act as your operator. These terms are the written agreement between responsible party and operator that section 21(2) of POPIA requires. As your operator we will:
- process recordings, transcripts, rosters and voiceprints only on your instruction and only to run the service for you;
- keep them confidential and not disclose them unless the law requires it;
- apply the security measures described in our privacy policy;
- tell you as soon as we reasonably can if we believe your content has been accessed without authority, so that you can meet your own duties under section 22 of POPIA.
You may not use Tymbr to:
- record anyone without a lawful basis, or in breach of a confidentiality duty you owe them;
- upload audio you have no right to process;
- enrol a voiceprint for anyone who has not consented, or for anyone under 18;
- attempt to access another account, probe our systems, or interfere with the service;
- resell access to Tymbr or run it as a service for third parties without our written agreement.
7. Your recordings, transcripts and Google imports
You keep the rights you hold in your recordings, transcripts, speaker rosters and edits. Importing material does not transfer someone else's rights to you or to us. You give us only the limited permission needed to copy, store, process and display that material for the features you request, using the operators listed in our privacy policy. You must have authority to give that permission.
Raw recordings are kept unchanged. You can download them and your transcripts at any time, and you can delete them at any time. Deleting removes the item from the live service immediately and from backups within 30 days. Once you delete something we cannot recover it, and keeping your own copies is your responsibility.
Connecting Google Calendar and Meet
Google sign-in by itself requests your identity information. Choosing Connect Calendar & Meet, or adding another Google account, separately requests read-only access to calendar events and Meet data. We show a notice before sending you to Google to grant those permissions. You can cancel before granting access.
Once connected, Tymbr imports data in the background, including while you are signed out. It reads recent and upcoming events from the connected identity's primary calendar, including titles, times, attendees and meeting links. For completed Meet calls that Google makes available to that identity, it imports existing transcripts, speech timestamps and participant names and identifiers. This connection does not start recording or transcription in Meet, and does not read the contents of Gemini smart-note documents.
We use these imports to organise your meetings, display, search and export transcripts, match a Meet call to your own recording, and name speakers. Meet names can also help update private voice-recognition profiles for people you have already chosen to remember under this account, as described in section 8. For example, Meet can identify a speaker as Alex in a call that Tymbr also recorded, so that recording shows Alex's name.
Automatic recording titles use your recording transcript and matching calendar context, which can include event names and organiser and attendee details. We send these to OpenAI through Cloudflare AI Gateway, with Cloudflare Workers AI as fallback. This is third-party AI processing, not processing exclusively on your device or our own server. Our privacy policy describes these providers, retention and our self-hosted voice-recognition model. Raw, aggregated and derived Google Workspace data is not used to develop, improve or train foundational or generalised AI or machine-learning models.
Tymbr uses commercial Mistral and OpenAI APIs to deliver transcription and recording-title features, rather than their consumer chat services. We use AI providers only under terms and account settings that exclude your content from general model training. We will not opt your content into a provider's model-training programme or send Google Workspace data to an endpoint that requires such use. AI inference and maintaining your account's private voice-recognition profiles do not give us or our providers permission to train a foundational or generalised model.
Your permission includes keeping calendar details and imported transcripts for your meeting history until you delete them or ask us to delete them. They do not automatically expire when Google stops making the original data available. We do not automatically mirror deletions or changes made in Google. Copies shared with an agent or another service are subject to that recipient's retention arrangements.
To stop future imports, remove Tymbr's access from your Google Account's third-party connections. This does not delete copies already in Tymbr. Delete those transcripts separately in Tymbr, and remove remembered voices separately if you no longer want them kept. For help deleting other imported data, email hello@tymbr.dev. Deleting a copy in Tymbr does not delete Google's original.
Tymbr's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements, and the Google Workspace user data and developer policy. These restrictions also apply to information derived from Google data. Your permission does not authorise a use that Google prohibits.
8. Voiceprints
A voiceprint is a mathematical profile of how a person sounds. Tymbr uses voiceprints to recognise the same speaker across your recordings. Voiceprints are biometric information and are special personal information under section 26 of POPIA. We process them only under the consent you obtain from each person, as section 27(1)(a) allows.
You may enrol a voiceprint for yourself. For anyone else, the confirmations in section 2 apply: explicit, informed consent that you can prove, deletion when they withdraw it, and no one under 18. The enrolment screen asks you to confirm this for each person, and we record that confirmation with a timestamp as evidence that you gave it. If someone asks you to remove their voiceprint, you must delete it, and Tymbr gives you a control to do so.
Voiceprints are stored encrypted, are never shared between accounts, and are deleted when you delete them or close your account.
For people you have already chosen to remember, Tymbr can use Meet's speaker names to associate samples from your own recordings with the correct person and improve that person's recognition profile within your account. This does not enrol a new person merely because they appear in Meet. You remain responsible for the permissions needed to maintain that profile. Forgetting the person stops further voice learning for them; historical transcript names remain unless you edit or delete those transcripts.
Voice recognition uses an existing model to produce matching profiles from audio samples. We do not train or improve the underlying model with your recordings, Google data or voiceprints, and we do not share your recognition profiles with other accounts.
9. Connecting your own agent
Tymbr offers Model Context Protocol (MCP), API access and transcript notifications so that an agent or integration you choose can work with your transcripts. Creating a credential, authorising an agent or adding a notification destination gives that integration the access you select. This can include Google-imported transcripts and meeting information. A notification may include meeting details even when the recipient must fetch the full transcript separately.
Only authorise an integration for a purpose you understand and have permission to request. If it sends Google data to an AI provider, the provider must not use that data to train or improve a general model. Do not send Google data to a service whose terms permit prohibited uses. User-requested analysis must stay within Google's permitted uses and your consent. We remain responsible for our own handling of Google data and do not transfer that responsibility to you.
Google data and information derived from it must not be sold, used for advertising, credit scoring or lending decisions, or used to train or improve models beyond Google's permitted personalised-use exception. You may not use Tymbr to bypass Google's access controls or account restrictions, or collect Meet data to track or evaluate employees' performance. Revoke agent credentials and remove notification destinations when you no longer want to share data. This stops future access through those connections; ask the recipient to delete any copies it already holds.
10. Availability and early access
Tymbr is currently in an invited early-access phase. We aim to keep it available, but we do not promise uninterrupted service, and features may change or be removed while we learn what works. We will give you 14 days' notice by email before removing a feature you have paid to use. If we shut the service down, we will refund unused credit.
11. What we do not do
- We do not generate AI summaries, action items or emails from your meetings. Your transcript is the product.
- We do not sell, rent or share your data for advertising.
- We do not use your recordings, transcripts, Google data or voiceprints to train or improve general AI models or our underlying voice-recognition model. The private recognition profiles described in section 8 are used only within your account.
- We do not send marketing messages unless you have asked for them.
- We do not review your recordings to check that you had the right to make them. That is your responsibility.
12. Suspension and closing your account
We may suspend or close your account immediately, without prior notice, if we reasonably believe you are recording unlawfully, enrolling voiceprints without consent, or breaking section 6 in any other way, if your payment is reversed, or if a regulator or court requires it. We will tell you why as soon as we are allowed to and give you a chance to respond.
If we close your account for any of these reasons, credit you have already used is not refunded. Unused credit is refunded unless the closure is for recording unlawfully or enrolling voiceprints without consent, in which case it is forfeited to offset the cost of dealing with the matter.
You can close your account at any time. Before you do, download anything you want to keep. When the account closes we delete your recordings, transcripts, rosters, voiceprints and device credentials, and purge them from backups within 30 days. Any unused credit is forfeited unless a refund is due under section 5 or section 10.
13. Complaints from other people
If a person tells us that you recorded them or enrolled their voiceprint without consent, we will pass the complaint to you. If you do not resolve it within 10 business days, or if the complaint appears well founded and delay could harm that person, we may delete the affected recording, transcript or voiceprint after notifying you. Where the law requires it, we may give your account contact details to the complainant or to the Information Regulator so that they can pursue the matter with you as the responsible party.
14. Law, changes and contact
South African law governs these terms, and South African courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, you may also refer a dispute to the National Consumer Commission or a consumer court. Nothing in these terms takes away a right the Consumer Protection Act or POPIA gives you.
We may update these terms. If a change matters to you, we will email you at least 14 days before it takes effect. Continuing to use Tymbr after that date means you accept the new terms. If you do not, close your account before that date and we will refund unused credit.
Accepting these terms or continuing to use Tymbr does not replace the separate consent needed to connect Google, enrol a remembered voice, or share Google data with an integration. An updated policy does not grant us new permissions by itself.
Questions about these terms: hello@tymbr.dev, or write to Gareth Saul trading as 20 East, 18 Lyndhurst Road, Kenilworth, Cape Town, 7708.