Legal

Terms of Service

Last updated: October 2026

1. Introduction

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of Markaloud ("the Service"), operated by Otherworld Dev Ltd ("we", "us", "our"). By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to be bound by these Terms.

Markaloud is a transcription and feedback tool designed for academic use in higher education. Markaloud transcribes the lecturer's spoken marking and drafts written feedback from it, with suggested marks against the rubric when one is used. The lecturer reviews and edits everything before it reaches a student.

2. Eligibility

The Service is intended for use by academic staff, teaching assistants, and other authorised personnel at higher education institutions. You must be at least 18 years old and have the authority to agree to these Terms on behalf of yourself or your institution.

3. Account Registration

You must provide a valid email address and verify it before using the Service. You are responsible for maintaining the security of your account credentials. You must notify us immediately at privacy@markaloud.cloud if you suspect unauthorised access to your account.

4. Acceptable Use

You agree to use the Service only for lawful academic purposes. You must not:

Upload content that is unlawful, defamatory, or infringes third-party rights
Attempt to reverse-engineer, decompile, or extract source code from the Service
Use the Service to process data unrelated to academic feedback
Share your account credentials or allow unauthorised access
Attempt to circumvent usage limits, rate limits, or security measures
Use automated tools to scrape, crawl, or extract data from the Service

5. Plans and Payments

Use of the Service is measured in transcription minutes, counted from the length of the audio processed. The Free plan includes 10 minutes a month, and every new account also gets 60 welcome minutes, which are used first. The paid plans are Educator (£6 a month or £60 a year, 200 minutes a month) and Educator Pro (£15 a month or £150 a year, 600 minutes a month). A plan's minutes are given each month, on yearly plans too, and don't carry over to the next. Subscribers can buy top-ups of 200 minutes for £8, which don't expire. Prices include VAT, and payments are taken by Stripe.

You can cancel a subscription at any time from the Billing page. When a subscription ends, or lapses because its payments have failed, the account moves to the Free plan, and recordings are then kept for the Free plan's retention period (see the Privacy Notice). Payments are non-refundable except where required by law or at our discretion.

Institutional customers are billed under separate agreements. Payment terms are specified in the institutional contract.

6. Intellectual Property

You retain ownership of all audio recordings, transcripts, and feedback content you create using the Service. We do not claim any intellectual property rights over your content.

The Service, including its design, code, and branding, is owned by Otherworld Dev Ltd. You may not copy, modify, or distribute any part of the Service without written permission.

7. AI-Generated Content

The Service uses AI: OpenAI Whisper and AssemblyAI to transcribe your recordings, and Anthropic Claude to draft the written feedback and suggest marks against the rubric. Everything it produces, marks included, is a draft for your review and editing. You are solely responsible for reviewing, editing, and approving all feedback and marks before sharing them with students.

Your institution may require you to tell students that their feedback was drafted with AI assistance. Shared reports and the PDF and Word exports say so, and the Help page has suggested wording for a module handbook or assignment brief.

We do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or appropriateness of AI-generated content. Academic judgement remains your responsibility.

8. Data Protection

We process personal data as described in our Privacy Notice. For your own account data we are the controller. For the student data you upload, such as recordings, transcripts, feedback, marks and names, we are a processor: for your institution under its Data Processing Agreement with us, or for you under section 9 if you subscribe on your own account. Recordings and transcripts are sent to the sub-processors listed in the Privacy Notice, none of which may use them to train their models.

9. Processor Terms for Individual Subscribers

This section applies when you use the Service on your own account, rather than under an agreement between your institution and us, to process personal data about students or others in the work you mark. For that data you, or the institution you mark for, are the controller and we are the processor, and this section is the contract between us that Article 28 of the UK GDPR requires. If your institution has a Data Processing Agreement with us that covers your account, that agreement applies instead.

Subject matter and duration. We process the data to provide the Service to you, for as long as you have an account, and then delete it as set out under Deletion below.
Nature and purpose. Storing your recordings, transcribing them, drafting feedback and suggested marks from them with AI, and storing and sharing the results as you direct.
Data and data subjects. Recordings of your spoken marking and their transcripts, feedback and marks, the student, class and assignment names you enter, annotation comments and passages of student work you highlight, about the students whose work you mark and anyone else recorded, such as in a viva.
Your instructions. We process the data only on your documented instructions, which are these Terms and the choices you make in the Service, unless the law requires otherwise, in which case we will tell you first unless the law forbids it. We will tell you if we think an instruction breaks data protection law.
Confidentiality. Anyone we authorise to process the data is bound by a duty of confidentiality.
Security. We keep appropriate technical and organisational security measures in place, as described in the Privacy Notice, including encryption in transit and encrypted backups.
Sub-processors. You give us general authorisation to use the sub-processors listed in the Privacy Notice and at markaloud.cloud/subprocessors. We will give you at least 30 days' notice of any addition or replacement, and if you object you may close your account. Each sub-processor is bound by data protection terms that give at least the same protection as this section, and we remain responsible to you for its work.
Assistance. We will help you respond to data subject rights requests, through the export, correction and deletion tools in the Service and on request at privacy@markaloud.cloud, and help you meet your obligations on security, personal data breaches, Data Protection Impact Assessments and consulting the Information Commissioner's Office. We will tell you without undue delay, and in any event within 48 hours, after becoming aware of a personal data breach affecting your data.
Deletion. When you delete your account we delete the data straight away, apart from copies in encrypted backups, which are deleted as the backups expire, within 120 days. You can export the data from Settings first. We keep data for longer only where the law requires us to.
Information and audits. We will make available the information needed to show we meet this section, and allow for and contribute to audits, including inspections, by you or an auditor you appoint, on reasonable notice.
International transfers. Where a sub-processor processes the data outside the UK, the transfer is covered by the safeguards described in the Privacy Notice.
Your responsibilities. You are responsible for having a lawful basis to upload the data and for telling students about it. If you mark for an institution, check that it allows you to use Markaloud before you upload any of its students' work.

10. Service Availability

We aim to provide reliable access to the Service but do not guarantee uninterrupted availability. We may perform maintenance, updates, or modifications that temporarily affect access. We will endeavour to provide reasonable notice of planned downtime.

11. Account Suspension and Termination

We may suspend or terminate your account if you violate these Terms, engage in fraudulent activity, or pose a security risk. You may delete your account at any time from the Settings page, which deletes your data straight away, apart from copies in encrypted backups, which expire within 120 days.

12. Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising from your use of the Service. Our total liability is limited to the amount you have paid us in the 12 months preceding the claim.

We are not responsible for any academic decisions made based on AI-generated feedback, nor for any consequences arising from the use of that feedback.

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot be limited or excluded by law.

13. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes will be communicated via email or an in-app notice. Continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

14. Governing Law

These Terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales. Any disputes arising from these Terms or the Service will be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.

15. Contact

For questions about these Terms, contact us at hello@markaloud.cloud. For anything about personal data, contact privacy@markaloud.cloud.

Markaloud is a trading name of Otherworld Dev Ltd.

Otherworld Dev Ltd · Registered in England and Wales, company no. 17175223 · 4th Floor, 14 Museum Place, Cardiff CF10 3BH · VAT GB 525 4039 08

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