Terms and conditions

Last updated: 1 November 2026

LipScribe (lipscribe.org) is a free, experimental tool that guesses what a person in a video is saying from the movement of their lips. It runs entirely in your browser. These terms apply to the website and the app. By using either, you agree to them. If you don't agree, please don't use LipScribe.

1. What LipScribe is

LipScribe reads lip movements with AI models that run on your own device. Your videos and transcripts are not uploaded to us, and we cannot see them. The service is a work in progress, is offered free of charge, and may change, break or stop at any time.

2. Transcripts are guesses, not records

Lip reading is uncertain by nature: many sounds look the same on the lips, and on real-world clips LipScribe gets about one word in three wrong. Every transcript is an automatic estimate. You must not:

• present a LipScribe transcript, or any part of it, as an accurate or verified account of what someone said;
• quote a real person, or attribute words to them, on the strength of a LipScribe transcript alone;
• use LipScribe's output as evidence, or as the basis for a decision about a person, for example in legal, police, disciplinary, employment, insurance, immigration, academic or medical matters.

If you share a transcript, say that it was produced automatically by lip-reading software and may be wrong.

3. Uses that are not allowed

You may not use LipScribe, or anything it produces, to:

1. Spy on people: find out what someone said without their knowledge where they could reasonably expect privacy, for example private conversations caught on CCTV, doorbell or hidden cameras, through windows, or in long-range footage of strangers.
2. Harm people: track, stalk, harass, intimidate, threaten, dox, blackmail or extort anyone.
3. Steal secrets: obtain passwords, PINs, account details, health information, trade secrets or other confidential information from what a person says.
4. Fake or twist what someone said: make false or misleading subtitles, deceptive or manipulated media (“deepfakes”), defamatory content, impersonations or disinformation, including about elections.
5. Commit fraud or other crimes, or help anyone else do so, including scams and social engineering.
6. Monitor or profile people: watch employees, students, tenants, partners, family members or the public without their informed consent and a lawful basis, or infer sensitive traits (such as health, beliefs or sexual orientation) from what they said.
7. Break the law: process videos you have no right to use, or in breach of privacy, data-protection, recording, interception, copyright or any other law that applies to you or to the people in the video.
8. Harm or exploit children in any way.
9. Make money: commercial use of LipScribe or its output is not allowed, because its lip-reading models are licensed for research and non-commercial use only.
10. Misuse the service itself: extract, copy or redistribute the models in breach of their licences, or overload, attack or interfere with the website.

4. Your responsibility

You alone choose which videos you process and what you do with the results, so you are responsible for both. Before you process a video, make sure you have the right to use it and any consent the law requires from the people in it. If the video shows other people, you are handling their personal data: because LipScribe runs on your device and sends us nothing, you, not LipScribe, decide how that data is processed, and you are responsible for doing so lawfully (for example under the GDPR, where it applies).

5. Privacy

• The app opens your video in your browser and runs the AI models there. Videos, their sound, faces and transcripts never leave your device unless you export or share them yourself.
• There are no accounts, no tracking cookies and no analytics. Your browser keeps your language choices and the downloaded models on your device.
• Our host, Cloudflare, handles the technical data that every web request involves (such as your IP address) to deliver the pages and models.
• Donations are handled by Stripe under its own terms and privacy policy. We never see your card details.

6. Licences

LipScribe is free for personal, educational and research use. The lip-reading models (Auto-AVSR for English and ViSpeR for Spanish, both fine-tuned by LipScribe, and AVSRCocktail, built on Meta’s AV-HuBERT, which reads English lips and sound together) and some of the data they were trained on are licensed for research and non-commercial use only. Their credits and licences are listed on the home page.

7. No warranty

LipScribe is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including of accuracy, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We don't promise that it will work on your device, be available, or give correct results.

8. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, LipScribe and the people who make it are not liable for any loss or damage arising from your use of LipScribe, from relying on its output, or from anyone's misuse of it, including indirect or consequential loss and loss of data, reputation or opportunity. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that the law does not allow to be excluded or limited, or takes away your mandatory rights as a consumer.

9. Indemnity

If you break these terms or the law while using LipScribe, you agree, to the extent the law allows, to compensate us for the claims, losses and costs (including reasonable legal fees) that result.

10. Misuse

We can't see what you process. If we learn that someone is misusing LipScribe, we may block their access and, where the law requires, cooperate with the competent authorities. If you believe LipScribe has been used to harm you, report it to the police or to your data-protection authority.

11. Changes

We may update these terms. The date at the top shows the latest version, and using LipScribe after a change means you accept the new terms. The terms are also published in other languages; if a translation differs from this English text, the English text prevails.