EchoBridge is offered free, for good, to any child who needs a way to be understood. These terms exist so that everyone knows where they stand — not to catch anybody out. The short version is below; the full terms follow.
- EchoBridge is free, and always will be. There is nothing to buy and no advertising.
- Everything your family types, records or teaches it stays on your own device. We have no server and no copy of it.
- It is a communication aid — a tool for talking. It is not a medical device, a therapy program, or a diagnosis.
- It is offered as it is. We cannot promise it will never have a fault, and we cannot be held responsible for what happens if it does.
- Please keep your own backups of anything that matters. Clearing your browser data will erase the board.
- Do not rely on it alone in an emergency. Keep a low-tech backup — a paper board, a photo card — within reach.
- It is built in San Francisco, and California law governs these terms.
- EchoBridge is owned by Aiftrades, Inc. and is licensed to you, not given to you. Free to use; not yours to copy, host, modify or reverse engineer. Share the link as widely as you like.
- Nobody may sell it or hand out copies of it — no company, school, charity or person — without our written permission. If anyone ever charges you for EchoBridge, they should not have. It is free at echobridge.org, and we would like to know: info@aiftrades.com.
- It is a service. If we stop offering it, your permission to use it ends with it.
1. Accepting these terms
By creating an account in EchoBridge, or by using the communication board without an account, you agree to these Terms of Use on behalf of yourself and of any child you support with it. If you do not agree, please do not use EchoBridge.
When you create an account, the version of these terms and the date you accepted them are recorded in your browser's own storage on your device, so that you have a record of what you agreed to. That record is not sent anywhere.
If these terms change in a way that matters, you will be asked to read and accept the new version the next time you sign in.
2. Who may use EchoBridge
EchoBridge is intended to be set up and supervised by an adult — a parent, carer, family member, teacher, teaching assistant, speech and language therapist, or another adult supporting a child's communication. The communication board itself is designed to be used by a child, with that adult's involvement.
If you are setting EchoBridge up for a child who is not your own, you confirm that you have the permission you need from that child's parent, guardian, or the organization responsible for them.
If you are under 18 and want to use EchoBridge for yourself, you are very welcome to — but please ask an adult you trust to help you set it up.
3. What EchoBridge is — and is not
EchoBridge is an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) aid. It gives a person a way to build and speak messages using symbols, words and recorded audio.
EchoBridge is not:
- a medical device. It has not been submitted for approval or clearance as one to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or to any other regulator;
- a diagnostic tool — nothing it shows you is an assessment of a child's ability, development or condition;
- a replacement for speech and language therapy, education, or professional advice;
- a monitoring, safeguarding or emergency service;
- a substitute for the judgement of the adults who know the child.
The suggestions, sentence predictions, insight summaries and the "Buddy" conversation partner are produced by simple pattern-matching that runs inside your own browser. They are prompts to help a conversation along. They are sometimes wrong, and they are never a professional opinion. Please treat them that way.
Decisions about a child's care, therapy, education or health should be made with qualified professionals — not on the basis of anything EchoBridge displays.
4. Free of charge
EchoBridge is provided free of charge, with no subscription, no trial period, no paid tier, no advertising, and nothing to unlock. Because you pay nothing for it, no commercial guarantee, service level, or support obligation is offered or implied.
Nobody is authorised to charge you for EchoBridge itself. If someone has asked you to pay for access to it, they are not acting for us.
5. Your data and privacy
EchoBridge has no server, no database, and no account system beyond your own device. Everything — the child's name, their words, photographs, recorded audio, usage history, learned movements and your account details — is stored in your browser's local storage on the device you are using, and stays there.
We cannot see any of it. We cannot recover any of it. Nobody at EchoBridge can reset a password for you, restore a deleted board, or look up an account, because no such record exists anywhere except on your device.
This has consequences you should understand before you rely on it:
- Clearing your browser's site data, using private browsing, or resetting the device will permanently erase everything.
- Nothing syncs between devices. A board set up on a tablet does not appear on a phone.
- Anyone with access to the unlocked device can open the board.
- Export a backup regularly from the dashboard, and keep it somewhere safe.
If you use the camera for movement learning or the microphone for recording a voice, that video and audio is processed in the browser on your device. Camera frames are used to compute movement patterns and are not stored as video. Recordings you deliberately save are stored on your device with the rest of the board.
The spoken voice is produced by your device's or browser's own text-to-speech. Some browsers send text to the operating system or to their vendor's servers to generate speech. That behavior belongs to your browser and device, not to EchoBridge, and is governed by their privacy policies.
The web font used by the site is requested from Google Fonts when you are online, which means your browser contacts Google's servers. If you would rather it did not, use EchoBridge offline — a full fallback font is built in.
The only things that are counted. The site keeps a tally of how many times each page was opened, and how many accounts were created — a number per day, and nothing else. An account being created adds one to a total; your name, your email address and everything else you typed stay on your device and are never sent. No IP address, no device or browser details, no referrer, no cookie, no session and no identifier of any kind is recorded, so no entry in that tally can be traced to a person. It is kept on our own server; no analytics company is involved and no third party ever sees it. Because nothing distinguishes one visitor from another, it counts page views rather than people.
If you would rather not be counted at all, turning on Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control in your browser stops it, and so does using EchoBridge offline. Nothing about the child, the board, the words, the recordings or the camera is included in it under any circumstances.
US privacy law, briefly. Because EchoBridge collects nothing, there is nothing for us to sell, share, disclose or hand over. We are not an operator collecting personal information from children under 13 within the meaning of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and we hold no personal information about California residents to which rights of access, deletion, correction or opt-out under the CCPA/CPRA could attach. Your data lives on your device, under your control, and you delete it by clearing the app's storage or the browser's site data. We satisfy these laws by having no data rather than by promising to be careful with it.
6. Accounts on this device
Accounts in EchoBridge are local to the device they were created on. The first account created on a device becomes the Owner of that device. The Owner, and any Administrator they appoint, can add, rename, re-role, reset the password of, or remove other accounts on that same device.
This is device administration, not a service account. An Administrator here has no powers anywhere else, and there is no central directory of users.
You are responsible for choosing a password that is not easy to guess, for keeping it to yourself, and for who you give an account or Administrator rights to on your device. Because there is no server, a forgotten password cannot be recovered — it can only be cleared, which is done from the sign-in screen and keeps the children's boards intact.
7. Your responsibilities
When you use EchoBridge you agree that you will:
- supervise a child's use of it appropriately for their age and needs;
- keep an independent backup of anything you would be upset to lose;
- keep a low-technology communication backup available;
- not use it as the sole means of communication in a situation where a failure could cause harm;
- only add photographs, recordings or names that you have the right to use;
- not use EchoBridge to harass, abuse, deceive or harm anyone;
- not attempt to break, misuse, or interfere with the site or with other people's use of it;
- comply with the laws that apply to you where you are.
8. No warranty
EchoBridge is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory. To the fullest extent permitted by the law that applies to you, we disclaim all implied warranties, including any implied warranty of merchantability, satisfactory quality, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement.
We do not warrant that:
- EchoBridge will be uninterrupted, available at any particular time, or free of faults;
- faults will be found or corrected;
- the words, translations, symbols, predictions or spoken output will be accurate, complete or appropriate for any particular person;
- it will meet any particular clinical, educational or personal requirement;
- data stored on your device will survive, or that any backup or export will be complete or readable.
Translations are provided so that families can use a board in their own language. They have been prepared with care but they are not certified translations, and regional usage varies. Please check the words that matter most to your child and change any that are not right — every word on the board can be edited.
9. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, EchoBridge, its author, contributors, and anyone who hosts or distributes it shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, nor for any loss of data, loss of use, loss of goodwill, loss of opportunity, or loss of profits, arising out of or in connection with your use of, or inability to use, EchoBridge — whether the claim is brought in contract, in tort (including negligence), under statute, or on any other basis, and whether or not we were advised that such loss was possible.
To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with EchoBridge shall not exceed the greater of (a) the total amount you have paid for EchoBridge, which is zero, or (b) ten United States dollars (US $10.00).
Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded. Under California law that includes liability for fraud, for wilful injury to the person or property of another, and for violation of law, whether wilful or negligent (California Civil Code § 1668) — and it includes any consumer rights you have that cannot be waived by agreement. Many other states and countries add further protections, often covering death or personal injury caused by negligence, and gross negligence. Those rights are unaffected by anything written here.
10. Release and indemnity
To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, you release EchoBridge, its author, contributors, hosts and distributors from all claims, demands, damages, losses, costs and expenses of every kind, known or unknown, arising out of or relating to your use of EchoBridge or the use of it by any child or other person you have set it up for — subject always to the carve-outs in section 9.
If you use EchoBridge in a professional, school or organizational setting, you agree to indemnify and hold harmless EchoBridge, its author and contributors against any third-party claim arising from that use, except to the extent the claim results from our own gross negligence or wilful misconduct.
Waiver of California Civil Code § 1542. To the extent this release is governed by California law, you waive California Civil Code § 1542, which reads: "A general release does not extend to claims that the creditor or releasing party does not know or suspect to exist in his or her favor at the time of executing the release and that, if known by him or her, would have materially affected his or her settlement with the debtor or released party." You waive that protection knowingly, and you waive any comparable statute or rule in any other jurisdiction — except for the claims that section 9 says cannot lawfully be released, which are not covered by this waiver.
Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, limitations or general releases of unknown claims. Where that is the case, the provisions of sections 8, 9 and 10 apply only to the extent permitted, and the remainder of these terms continues in force.
11. Ownership, and the licence you are given
11.1 Who owns EchoBridge
EchoBridge is owned by Aiftrades, Inc. ("Aiftrades", "we", "us"), a corporation organized under the laws of the State of Delaware with its principal place of business in San Francisco, California.
Aiftrades owns all right, title and interest in and to EchoBridge and every part of it, including without limitation: the source code, object code and compiled assets; the visual design, layout, colour system, iconography and logo; the EchoBridge name and any associated marks; the selection, arrangement, coordination and organization of the vocabulary, categories and colour coding; the translations into every supported language; the written guidance, help content and documentation; the prediction, grammar, morphology, conversation and movement-recognition logic; and every modification, enhancement and derivative work of any of them, whether made by us or by anyone else. All of it is protected by United States and international copyright, trademark, trade secret and other intellectual property laws and treaties.
EchoBridge is licensed to you, not sold or given to you. Nothing in these terms transfers ownership of anything to you. All rights not expressly granted in section 11.2 are reserved by Aiftrades. The fact that EchoBridge is provided free of charge does not place it in the public domain, does not make it open source, and does not waive, reduce or exhaust any right we hold in it.
11.2 What you are permitted to do
Subject to your compliance with these terms, Aiftrades grants you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable licence to access and use EchoBridge as it is made available at echobridge.org, through a standard web browser, for the purpose of supporting the communication of a child or other person in your care.
This licence includes permission to:
- use EchoBridge for personal, family, educational, clinical or charitable purposes, at no cost;
- add EchoBridge to a device's home screen using your browser's own "install" or "add to home screen" function, and use the copy your browser caches for offline use, for as long as this licence remains in force;
- print the picture cards and board layouts the app generates, and use those printouts with the person you support;
- export a child's own profile and import it on another device you control;
- tell anyone about EchoBridge and share the link to echobridge.org as widely as you like. We want as many families to reach it as possible. Sharing the address is encouraged; distributing a copy is not.
11.3 What you may not do
Except where the law gives you a right that cannot be waived by agreement (see 11.4), you may not, and may not permit or assist anyone else to:
- copy, duplicate, download, mirror, archive or otherwise reproduce EchoBridge or any part of it, other than the automatic caching your own browser performs to let you use it;
- host, publish, deploy, re-upload or make EchoBridge available from any server, domain, network, app store or distribution channel other than one operated by or for Aiftrades;
- reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, de-minify, de-obfuscate or otherwise attempt to derive the source code, structure, algorithms, ideas or organization of EchoBridge or any part of it;
- modify, adapt, translate, port or create derivative works based on EchoBridge, or incorporate any part of it into another product, application or service;
- sell, rent, lease, lend, sublicense, distribute, white-label, rebrand or commercially exploit EchoBridge, or charge any person any fee for access to it;
- remove, obscure or alter any copyright, trademark, authorship or other proprietary notice;
- use any robot, spider, scraper, headless browser or automated means to access, index, harvest or bulk-download EchoBridge or its assets, beyond ordinary search-engine indexing of the public pages;
- use EchoBridge, or any part of it, as training data for, or as input to, any machine-learning model, artificial-intelligence system, dataset or corpus;
- circumvent, disable or interfere with any security, access-control or integrity feature of EchoBridge or of the site that serves it;
- use the EchoBridge name, logo or marks in a way that suggests endorsement, affiliation or a relationship that does not exist.
11.4 Where the law overrides this
Nothing in section 11.3 restricts any act you are entitled to perform under a law that cannot be excluded by agreement. In particular, and without limiting that sentence, the restriction on reverse engineering does not apply to the extent that decompilation is permitted for interoperability purposes under Article 6 of Directive 2009/24/EC of the European Union or an equivalent provision of your national law, nor does anything here purport to restrict fair use under 17 U.S.C. § 107 or the equivalent doctrine in your jurisdiction. Where such a right applies, please contact us first at info@aiftrades.com — in most cases we would rather simply help you.
11.5 EchoBridge is a hosted service, not a product you keep
EchoBridge is made available as a service at echobridge.org. It is not sold, delivered or licensed to you as a perpetual copy, and you acquire no ongoing right to possess, retain or run it independently of that service.
If the service is discontinued, suspended, or ceases to be available for any reason, the licence granted in section 11.2 terminates automatically at that moment. Aiftrades may discontinue or suspend EchoBridge at any time, in whole or in part, with or without notice, and is under no obligation to continue offering it. On termination you must stop using EchoBridge and remove any copy your browser has cached or installed, by clearing the app's site data or deleting the installed app.
For clarity, and so that nobody is misled: because EchoBridge is designed to work offline, a copy your browser has already cached may continue to function on your device for a time after the service ends, until that cache is cleared. That is a technical consequence of offline support and is not a grant of any right. Continued use after this licence has terminated is unlicensed and is not permitted.
11.6 Your own content remains yours
Anything you add — a child's name, photographs, recordings, custom words and phrases, learned movements and history — remains entirely yours. It is stored on your device and never reaches us, so we acquire no rights over it and could not use it even if we wanted to. Nothing in this section 11 gives Aiftrades any claim to it.
11.7 Feedback
If you send us a suggestion, a bug report, a corrected translation or any other feedback, you grant Aiftrades a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use it without restriction and without obligation to you. Please do not send us anything you consider confidential or that you are not free to give.
11.8 Breach, and what happens then
This licence terminates automatically and immediately if you breach section 11.3, without any notice being required. Aiftrades may also suspend or terminate your access at any time for any reason. You acknowledge that a breach of section 11.3 would cause harm for which money is not an adequate remedy, and that Aiftrades is entitled to seek injunctive relief in addition to any other remedy available to it, without posting a bond.
Sections 11.1, 11.3, 11.6, 11.7, 11.10 and this 11.8, together with sections 8, 9, 10 and 13, survive any termination of this licence.
11.9 Third-party material
Symbols on the board are standard Unicode emoji rendered by your own device's font; their appearance belongs to whoever made that font. The Atkinson Hyperlegible typeface is used under its own licence from the Braille Institute of America. Nothing in this section 11 claims any right in either.
11.10 Not for sale, and not for redistribution — by anyone
EchoBridge is not for sale, and is not available for redistribution, by any organization or individual — commercial, non-profit, governmental, educational or charitable — without the prior written consent of Aiftrades, Inc.
This section states plainly, and in one place, what sections 11.1 to 11.3 already establish. Without our prior written consent, no person and no organization may:
- sell, resell, licence, sublicense, rent, lease or charge any fee for EchoBridge, for access to it, or for anything that includes it — including a subscription, a membership, a support contract, a bundled service, a device sold with it pre-loaded, or a "handling", "setup" or "training" charge that is in substance a charge for the app;
- distribute or redistribute EchoBridge or any part of it — by publishing it to a website, server, app store, marketplace, repository or network; by supplying it on a disk, drive or memory card; by bundling it with hardware, software or a service; or by any other means of delivering a copy to another person;
- rebrand, white-label, re-skin or re-publish EchoBridge under another name, logo, organization or domain, or present it as that party's own product, or as built, endorsed, certified or supported by them;
- represent that they are authorized to sell, distribute, license or support EchoBridge, or that they are an agent, reseller, partner or affiliate of Aiftrades.
Sharing the link is always welcome. Telling a family, a school, a clinic or a whole country to go to echobridge.org needs no permission from anyone and never will. What requires consent is handing over a copy, or charging for what we give away.
Why this exists — it protects the families, not our revenue
We earn nothing from EchoBridge, so this is not a clause about money. It is here because an unauthorized copy is a copy that a family cannot check. A copy taken and re-hosted elsewhere can be silently altered, can be a stale version that no longer carries a safety fix, can have tracking or advertising added to it, can have its offline behaviour or its emergency words changed, and can quietly stop storing data only on the device — and the parent using it has no way to tell any of that from the real thing. A copy someone is charging for is worse still: a family with a non-speaking child may pay for something that has always been, and remains, free at echobridge.org. Keeping one authentic source is how we keep that promise honest.
If you believe you have been sold, charged for, or given a copy of EchoBridge by anybody, please tell us at info@aiftrades.com. You have done nothing wrong, you are not in trouble, and the real app remains free to you at echobridge.org.
Enforcement
Any sale or distribution of EchoBridge in breach of this section is a material breach of these terms and terminates the offending party's licence immediately and automatically. It is also, independently of these terms, an infringement of Aiftrades' copyright and trademark rights, which exist and are enforceable against any person or organization whether or not they ever accepted these terms. Aiftrades intends to enforce those rights to the fullest extent permitted by law, and reserves every remedy available to it in any jurisdiction in which the infringement occurs or has effect — including injunctive relief, statutory and actual damages, an account of profits, delivery-up or destruction of infringing copies, takedown and domain or app-store removal proceedings, and recovery of its costs and attorneys' fees where recoverable. Section 13 governs disputes with a party who has accepted these terms; nothing in section 13 limits where Aiftrades may bring proceedings against a party who has not.
We would far rather talk first. If your organization wants to distribute EchoBridge, deploy it inside a school district, health service or charity, or offer it in a language or a form we do not yet support, write to info@aiftrades.com. Consent is granted in writing, and for a genuine effort to reach children who need it, it is usually granted.
12. Changes and availability
EchoBridge may be updated, changed, moved, suspended or discontinued at any time, in whole or in part, without notice and without liability to you. There is no commitment that it will remain available for any period.
If it is discontinued, your licence to use it ends at that moment — see section 11.5 — and you must stop using it and clear the copy cached on your device. Because EchoBridge is built to work offline, a cached copy may keep functioning until it is cleared; that is a technical side-effect, not permission to carry on.
These terms may be updated. The version number and date at the top of this page will change, and material changes will require your acceptance at the next sign-in. Continuing to use EchoBridge after a change means you accept it.
If any part of these terms is found to be unenforceable, that part is narrowed to the minimum extent needed, or removed, and everything else stays in effect.
13. Governing law and venue
EchoBridge is developed in San Francisco, California, United States.
These terms, and any dispute arising out of or relating to them or to EchoBridge, are governed by the laws of the State of California, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.
You and we agree that the state and federal courts located in the City and County of San Francisco, California have exclusive jurisdiction over any such dispute, and each of us consents to personal jurisdiction and venue there.
If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer laws of the state or country where you live. Where those laws give you the right to bring proceedings locally, or entitle you to the protection of your own courts, that right is unaffected by this section.
14. Contact
Questions about these terms, a fault you have found, or a word that is translated wrongly: email info@aiftrades.com. Because EchoBridge is run as a charitable project rather than a business, replies may take a while — but reports about wrong words or broken features are always worth sending.