Terms of Service

01The agreement

These terms are between Puzzle Business Group LLC of 2415 W Bradley Ave, Champaign, IL, United States ("Vocobook", "we", "us") and the business that buys the service ("you").

They apply together with the order form, quote or plan page you accepted, which sets your plan, your install fee, your monthly fee, your included minutes and your minimum term. Where the order form and these terms disagree, the order form wins for that specific point.

You accept these terms by signing the order, paying the install fee, or using the service — whichever happens first. If you are accepting on behalf of a company, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.

Vocobook is sold to businesses, not to consumers, and it currently serves United States telephone numbers only.

02What the service is

Vocobook answers your inbound business calls with an AI receptionist. On a call it can:

• answer questions from the services, hours, prices and approved answers you gave us;
• book, and where enabled reschedule, an appointment into your connected calendar;
• take a caller's name, phone number, email and request as a message or a lead;
• send a confirmation by text message and email;
• transfer the call to a number you nominate, when the call needs a person; and
• write the call up — transcript, summary and outcome — in your dashboard.

It is a managed service. We do the setup, we hold the configuration, and we run it. You get a dashboard to see calls, appointments and leads, and to change your own business information.

There is no free tier and no self-serve trial. An account that has signed up but not paid can be configured and test-called; it cannot answer a real caller.

03Installation and going live

The one-time installation fee covers the work of making the receptionist yours:

• provisioning your telephone number, or preparing to receive calls forwarded from your existing one;
• loading your services, prices, staff, hours and policies;
• connecting your calendar and setting the booking rules — slot length, buffers, notice, how far ahead you take bookings;
• writing and testing the receptionist's script, including what it must not say; and
• test calls with you before it takes a real one.

Installation needs things only you can give us: your service list, your hours, calendar access, and a person who will answer our questions and take the test calls. We cannot finish without them, and delay caused by waiting on them does not pause your billing once the subscription has started.

The receptionist goes live for real callers only after the install fee is paid and you confirm the configuration. We will not switch it on quietly.

04Never for emergencies

You must not use Vocobook as the answering line for a medical answering service, a crisis line, an after-hours emergency dispatch line, an alarm or monitoring line, or any number that people in danger are told to call. If your business publishes an emergency or urgent number, that number must reach a human being and must not be routed to Vocobook.

Where an account is in healthcare mode, the receptionist is instructed that if a caller describes an emergency it must tell them to hang up and call 911 and end the call. That is a safety instruction on a language model. It is not a guarantee, it is not a substitute for a human, and it does not make the line safe for emergencies.

You will tell your staff this, and you accept the risk of any use of the service contrary to this section.

05Fees, install fee and taxes

Vocobook is priced in two parts:

• A one-time installation fee, payable before the receptionist goes live. It pays for the setup work in section 3. It is non-refundable once that work has begun, because it has been done.
• A monthly subscription, billed in advance for each billing period, at the amount on your order form.

Payment is by card through Stripe. By subscribing you authorise us to charge that card for the monthly fee, any overage under section 6, and any applicable tax, until the subscription ends.

The price you were quoted is the price you pay for your billing period, and where your order form states a price lock, we will not raise it during that window. Outside a price lock, we may change your fees on at least 30 days' written notice, taking effect at your next renewal; if you do not accept the change you may cancel before it takes effect without penalty, subject to any minimum term you are still inside.

Fees are exclusive of sales, use, telecommunications and similar taxes, which we may add where we are required to collect them. Carrier surcharges and regulatory fees passed through by our telephony provider may be added at cost.

Except where these terms or the law say otherwise, fees are non-refundable and we do not pro-rate a partial month.

06Usage allowance and overage

Each plan includes a monthly allowance of receptionist call minutes, stated on your order form. Minutes are measured on the connected call, counted per billing period, and do not roll over.

Minutes used above the allowance are billed at the per-minute overage rate on your order form, in arrears, at the end of the billing period. Your dashboard shows usage during the period so an overage is never a surprise at the end of it.

Text messages are included within reasonable use for confirmations and reminders. Heavy messaging, marketing messaging, or numbers that our carrier charges us differently for may be billed at cost, and we will tell you before that happens.

Your plan includes a number of telephone numbers, stated on your order form. Additional numbers are billed at the monthly cost we are charged plus any published margin, and are purchased only on approval.

07Minimum term, renewal and cancellation

Your subscription runs for the minimum term stated on your order form, and renews automatically for successive periods of the same length until cancelled. Unless your order form says otherwise, the minimum term is one month.

To cancel, tell us in writing at the address in section 24 at least 10 days before your next renewal date. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for. The receptionist keeps answering until then.

If you cancel inside a minimum term, the remaining months of that term become payable, because the discounted price and the reduced install fee that came with the commitment were priced on it. We will not hold you to a minimum term where you are cancelling because we have materially breached these terms and have not fixed it within 30 days of your written notice.

On cancellation we stop answering your calls, we release or transfer your number under section 9, and your access to the dashboard ends. Ask us before your account closes and we will give you an export of your calls, contacts and appointments. We will keep your data available for 30 days after the account ends so you have time to ask; after that it is deleted or anonymised in line with our Privacy Policy.

08Late and failed payment

If a payment fails we will retry it and email you. If the account is still unpaid 7 days after the due date we may mark it past due and, after a further 7 days, suspend the receptionist. A suspended receptionist stops answering your calls.

We will always email before suspending. Reinstating a suspended account may require the outstanding balance to be cleared, and, if the number has already been released, a new number.

Overdue amounts may accrue interest at 1.5% per month or the maximum the law allows, whichever is lower, plus reasonable costs of collection. Suspension does not relieve you of fees for the period of suspension, and it does not shorten a minimum term.

09Phone numbers

There are two ways your calls reach the receptionist, and they end very differently.

A number we buy for you

If we provision a new number, it is purchased on our telephony account and, as between us and you, it is ours while you subscribe. You have the exclusive right to use it for as long as your account is in good standing. No telephone number is owned outright by anybody; numbers are assigned by carriers under regulatory rules and can be reclaimed by them.

On cancellation or non-payment, that number is released and returned to the carrier's pool 30 days after your account ends. Once released it is gone and cannot be recovered. Where the law and the carrier allow it, you may port the number to your own carrier before it is released, and we will cooperate with a valid port request at no charge — but you must start it before the 30 days run out.

Your own number, forwarded

If you keep your existing number and forward calls to us, it stays yours throughout. On cancellation you simply turn the forwarding off. This is the safer arrangement and we recommend it.

You are responsible for the accuracy of anything you give us for number provisioning or porting, including any address or registration required by the carrier or the regulator.

10Your callers' data and your obligations

You are responsible for:

• Disclosing that calls are handled by an automated system and transcribed. Several US states require every party to a call to consent before it is recorded, and a transcript produced from a caller's speech may count as a recording. You must make the disclosure the law in your state and your callers' states requires — normally as a spoken line at the start of the call, which we will configure for you. Ask a lawyer in your state if you are unsure. Do not switch that disclosure off.
• Having a lawful basis to collect and hold the caller information the receptionist gathers for you, and your own privacy notice covering it.
• Setting your account's data retention period, and telling us when a caller asks you to delete their record.
• The accuracy of the business information you give us. The receptionist answers from what you provided; if your prices or hours are wrong in the configuration, it will confidently give a caller the wrong ones.
• Keeping your dashboard credentials secure, and everything done under your account.

How we handle personal information is set out in the Privacy Policy, which forms part of this agreement, including the sub-processors we use. Read it before you go live.

If your business is subject to HIPAA, note that we are not a HIPAA business associate and we do not currently sign Business Associate Agreements. The healthcare mode in the product is a set of safety rules for the receptionist, not a compliance certification. Do not put Vocobook in front of a line that receives protected health information you are obliged to protect under HIPAA.

11Text messages and email

The receptionist can send appointment confirmations and reminders by SMS and email. These are transactional messages sent to someone who asked for the appointment on the call.

You must not use the service to send marketing, promotional or bulk messages. You are responsible for compliance with the TCPA, CAN-SPAM and any other law that applies to messages sent from your business, including honouring opt-outs.

SMS delivery depends on the carriers and on US messaging registration requirements (10DLC) that are outside our control. We do not guarantee that any individual message is delivered. Where SMS is unavailable for your account, confirmations are sent by email.

12Acceptable use

You will not, and will not permit anyone else to:

• use the service for any emergency, urgent care, crisis, alarm or life-safety line (section 4);
• use it for outbound telemarketing, robocalling, cold calling, political or survey calling, or any campaign of unsolicited calls or messages;
• impersonate another business, or configure the receptionist to claim credentials, licences or affiliations you do not have;
• configure the receptionist to give medical, legal, financial or other regulated professional advice;
• use it to collect payment card numbers, Social Security numbers, or government identification numbers — the receptionist is instructed to refuse these, and you must not try to work around that;
• use it for anything unlawful, fraudulent, harassing, or in breach of telecommunications rules;
• resell, sublicense or provide the service to a third party as your own without our written agreement;
• attempt to extract, copy, reverse engineer or benchmark the underlying models, prompts or systems, or use the service to build a competing product;
• probe, scan, overload or attempt to circumvent the security or tenant isolation of the platform; or
• exceed reasonable use in a way that degrades the service for other customers.

We may investigate suspected breaches, and section 20 says what we can do about them.

13Service levels, stated honestly

We aim to keep the receptionist answering around the clock, and we watch it. But the service depends on things we do not control: the telephone carrier, the speech model provider, your calendar provider, your internet connection and our hosting platform. Any of them can fail, and when one does your calls are affected.

What we do commit to:

• we monitor the service and respond to outages as our first priority;
• we will tell you when we know your line is affected;
• we schedule disruptive maintenance outside normal business hours where we can; and
• support is by email at the address in section 24, with a target first response within one business day. Support is 9am–5pm on business days in Central Time (Chicago). We do not offer 24/7 support.

Plan for the failure. Configure a forwarding number so that if the receptionist cannot answer, calls fall through to a phone that rings. We strongly recommend keeping voicemail or a human backup on the line. Do not let Vocobook be the only thing between a customer and your business.

14What the AI will and will not do

The receptionist is a language model following instructions. It is good, and it is not a person. It can mishear a name or a number, misunderstand an unusual request, or answer a question it should have escalated. It is built to say "I don't want to give you the wrong information" and hand the call to a human rather than guess, and it is instructed never to invent prices, availability, policies, guarantees or wait times — but no such instruction is perfect.

You are responsible for reviewing the calls, bookings and messages it produces for you. Check the dashboard. We will not be liable for a booking made in error, a message taken down wrongly, an appointment double-booked because of a calendar sync failure, or business lost to a call the receptionist mishandled, except to the extent section 18 allows.

We may change the underlying speech and language models as they improve or as our providers retire them. We will not degrade what the receptionist does for you without telling you.

15Intellectual property and feedback

We own the Vocobook platform, its software, prompts, designs, brand and documentation. Your subscription is a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service during the term. Nothing here transfers ownership of our software to you.

You own your data. Your business information, your call transcripts, your contacts and your appointments are yours. You grant us the licence needed to host, process and transmit them in order to run the service for you, including sending them to the sub-processors named in the Privacy Policy.

We may use aggregated, de-identified statistics about how the service performs — call volumes, durations, booking rates — to operate and improve it. We will not identify you or your callers, and we will not sell your data.

If you send us feedback or a feature suggestion, we may use it freely and without obligation to you.

16Confidentiality

Each of us may learn the other's confidential information. Each of us will protect it with reasonable care, use it only to perform this agreement, and not disclose it except to people and providers who need it and are bound to keep it confidential, or where the law compels disclosure.

This does not cover information that is public, already known without a duty of confidence, or independently developed.

17Disclaimer of warranties

We will provide the service with reasonable skill and care. Beyond that, and to the fullest extent the law allows, the service is provided "as is" and "as available", and we disclaim all other warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty arising from course of dealing or usage of trade.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free or secure against every attack; that the receptionist will understand every caller or handle every call correctly; that any particular call will be answered, connected, transferred or transcribed; that any SMS or email will be delivered; or that using Vocobook will produce any particular number of bookings, leads or revenue.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain disclaimers, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

18Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business, lost bookings, lost goodwill or lost data, even if told such damages were possible.

To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability arising out of or relating to this agreement is limited to the amounts you actually paid us for the service in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim. The installation fee is included in that figure.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

These limits reflect what this service costs. The fee is priced on the basis that we are not underwriting your business's revenue, and if you need cover of that kind, insurance is the right instrument for it.

19Indemnity

You will defend and indemnify us against claims, damages and reasonable costs arising from: your use of the service in breach of these terms; your failure to disclose call recording or transcription as required by law; the content of the messages you have us send; your business information and the answers you configured the receptionist to give; use of the service for any emergency or life-safety purpose; and your breach of any law applicable to your business.

We will tell you promptly about any claim, let you control the defence of it, and cooperate reasonably. You will not settle a claim in a way that admits fault on our behalf without our consent.

20Suspension and termination by us

We may suspend or terminate the service if:

• you do not pay (section 8);
• you breach section 4 or section 12, in which case we may suspend immediately;
• a carrier, regulator or provider requires it;
• your use puts the platform, another customer or a caller at risk; or
• you materially breach these terms and do not fix it within 15 days of our written notice.

Where we can, we will warn you first and give you a chance to put it right. Where the risk is immediate, we will act first and tell you as soon as we have.

We may also stop offering the service, or stop offering it in your area, on 60 days' written notice, in which case we will refund the unused portion of any prepaid monthly fee and will not hold you to the remainder of a minimum term.

21Changes to the service and to these terms

We improve the product continuously and features change. We will not materially reduce the core functions described in section 2 during a period you have paid for without telling you.

We may update these terms. We will post the new version here with a new date, and for a material change we will email account owners at least 30 days before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that date means you accept the change; if you do not, you may cancel before it takes effect.

22Governing law and disputes

This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Illinois, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

The state and federal courts located in Champaign County, Illinois have exclusive jurisdiction, and both of us consent to that venue.

Before filing anything, the party with the complaint will give the other written notice and both will try in good faith to resolve it within 30 days. Either of us may still seek injunctive relief at any time to protect intellectual property or confidential information.

Each party waives any right to a jury trial and to bring claims as a class action, to the extent the law allows.

23General

Independent parties. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, employment or agency relationship.

Assignment. Neither party may assign this agreement without the other's written consent, except that either may assign it to a successor in a merger or sale of substantially all its business.

Force majeure. Neither party is liable for a failure caused by something beyond its reasonable control — including carrier and provider outages, internet failures, power cuts, and acts of government.

Severability and waiver. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stands. Not enforcing a right once does not waive it.

Notices. Notices to you go to the email address on your account. Notices to us go to the address in section 24. Email counts as writing.

Entire agreement. These terms, your order form and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us on this subject and replace anything said before it.

Reference. We may name you as a customer and use your logo on our website unless you tell us not to. Any case study or quotation needs your prior approval.

24Contact

Support, billing and cancellation: [email protected]

Legal notices: [email protected]

By post: Puzzle Business Group LLC, 2415 W Bradley Ave, Champaign, IL, United States

Privacy questions are answered in the Privacy Policy.