Terms of Use

01Ambient, and your licence to it

Rao grants you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install Ambient on Macs you own or control, and to use it for yourself or your work. Ambient is free. On-device, its replies, its voice and its memory run on your Mac, with no account and no API key. Ambient Plus adds what runs on hosted services (section 03).

Ambient reads the window in front of you through the Accessibility permission you give it in macOS, and it only reads: it never clicks, types or edits anything for you. You can take that permission back at any time in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility.

Every 0.x release is a beta. It may have bugs, and features may change or be withdrawn. Please don’t resell Ambient, remove its notices, or take it apart beyond what the law allows.

02Your account

You don’t need an account: choose Use Ambient on-device at the first launch and Ambient never asks for one. An account is an email address and a password, confirmed by a 6-digit code we send. It is one Rao account for Ambient, Craft and Veil. One account per person. Keep the password to yourself, and tell us at once if you think someone else has it; what is done with your account is yours to answer for.

You must be at least 13 to have an account, and old enough to subscribe where you live, or have a parent’s or guardian’s permission. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms (section 09).

03Ambient Plus

Ambient Plus is a subscription on your account. It adds hosted replies from Mistral’s models with no API key of your own, a hosted voice, the pictures on a page described, the news, and the plugins Ambient gains after it. Ambient Plus is Rao Plus: bought here it is Plus in every Rao app that offers more with it, and Plus bought in another Rao app is Plus in Ambient. What Plus includes may grow. If we take away something the plan is sold on, we will tell you by email before it happens, and you can cancel.

It is sold monthly, at $10 a month, or yearly, at $96 a year, in US dollars. Checkout shows the price, and any tax the law adds, before you pay. Where we offer a promotion code, you enter it there.

One free trial of 7 days is offered to each account, once; an earlier subscription on the account uses it up. A card is asked for at the start, and nothing is charged until the trial ends. Cancel before then and nothing is ever charged.

After the trial, and at the end of each month or year, Plus renews automatically and charges the card on file until you cancel. An account holds one subscription at a time.

Cancel any time from Manage billing on the account page. Upgrade and Manage, in Ambient’s menubar and Settings, open the same page. You can also switch between monthly and yearly there, and change your card. Once cancelled, Plus runs to the end of the period already paid for and then stops, and Ambient goes back to on-device replies, or to your own key.

If a renewal fails, Plus continues for seven days while Stripe retries and you update the card. After that it pauses until a payment goes through. We don’t refund the unused part of a period, except where the law where you live requires it, or where you were charged twice or by mistake: write to ritesh@rao.nyc. If the price changes, we will email you at least 30 days before it applies to you, and you can cancel before then.

04Payment, through Stripe

Payments are taken by Stripe. Rao never receives your card number; we see what Stripe shows you back: the brand, the last four digits and the expiry. By starting a trial or subscribing, you authorise Rao, through Stripe, to charge that card when the trial ends and at each renewal, until you cancel. Receipts are kept on the account page, and Stripe emails each one. Stripe’s own terms and privacy policy apply to how it handles the card.

05A Mistral key of your own

Signed in without Plus, you may paste a Mistral API key of your own under Provider keys in Settings. Hosted replies, voice and pictures then run on your key, under Mistral’s terms, and Mistral bills you for them; Rao charges nothing for this and isn’t responsible for what Mistral bills. The news stays with Plus. Keep the key safe: what is done with it is between you and Mistral.

06What Ambient says

Ambient’s replies, insights, descriptions and news briefs are written by language models, on your Mac or hosted. They can be wrong, incomplete or out of date, even when they sound sure. They are not medical, legal, financial or other professional advice. The brushstrokes and royalty shares show what a reply drew on as well as Ambient can tell; they are a guide, not a guarantee.

The news is reporting by third-party outlets, retold. Every line traces back to a headline and the outlet that ran it, but the reporting is theirs, and we don’t vouch for it.

07What you read stays yours

What you read, say, write and keep in Ambient is yours, and Rao claims no rights in it. You are responsible for using Ambient within the obligations you have to others, such as an employer’s or a client’s rules on what may be read by software, or sent to a hosted service. On-device, nothing you read, say or keep leaves your Mac. With Plus or your own key, the hosted features send what you read to Mistral as you read; what they send, and to whom, is in the Privacy Policy.

08Ambient Link, in beta

Ambient Link, the iPhone app, is a beta distributed through Apple’s TestFlight, under Apple’s terms for it. It may break, change or end. It pairs only with your own Mac, and only when you allow it there.

09Fair use

Plus is for one person’s own use. Please don’t share your account or resell access to it; drive the hosted features with scripts, or at a volume beyond one person’s reading; make new accounts to take the trial again, or otherwise get round the plan check; probe or attack the service; or use Ambient to break the law or anyone’s rights. We may limit the hosted features for an account that does, or suspend it, and we will tell you why.

10No warranty, and the limit of our liability

Ambient, Ambient Link, the account and Ambient Plus are provided as is and as available, without warranties of any kind, to the fullest extent the law allows. Hosted features depend on services we don’t run, such as Mistral’s and the news sources’, and may be slow or unavailable.

To the extent the law allows, Rao Studios, LLC is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost data or lost work. Our total liability for anything arising from these terms is limited to the greater of what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or US$50. This limit doesn’t apply to liability the law doesn’t let us limit, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Nothing here takes away consumer rights that can’t be excluded where you live.

11What stays ours

The names Rao, Ambient, Ambient Link and Mary, and the apps, their design and this site, belong to Rao Studios, LLC. Open-source parts of Ambient, such as the model behind Mary’s on-device voice, are under their own licences.

12Changes, and ending

The current terms live at ambient.rao.nyc/terms, with their date at the top. A material change will also be sent to the email on your account before it applies, and a change never takes away a period of Plus you have already paid for. You can stop using Ambient at any time by deleting it. To close your account, cancel Plus and write to ritesh@rao.nyc from the account’s address; Plus is not refunded on closing, except as section 03 says. We may end this agreement if you break section 09. Sections 06, 07, 10, 11 and 13 survive it.

13Governing law, and how to reach us

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the state and federal courts in New York County have jurisdiction, except where the law of the country you live in lets you bring a claim at home. There is no arbitration clause and no class-action waiver.

Rao Studios, LLC, New York, USA. ritesh@rao.nyc. A person reads that address.