Terms of service

These terms are an agreement between ZII Ltd (“ZII”, “we”) and the business that signs up for Oscar (“you”). By creating an account, starting a trial or using Oscar you accept them on behalf of your business, and you confirm you have the authority to do so. Oscar is for businesses, not for personal or household use.

1. The service

Oscar answers the calls you send to the number we give you, using the setup you publish: your greeting, call reasons, prices, hours and transfer rules. He can book into your schedule, take messages, put callers through to your team, text callers, and send you a summary of each call. Features depend on your plan, as shown on the pricing page and in Billing.

We try to answer every call routed to us, and to send calls to your backup number or voicemail when our AI service is unavailable. We don’t promise that the service, the fallback or any alert will work every time, without interruption or without errors. We don’t offer a service level or uptime guarantee unless we agree one with you in writing.

2. Your account and your team

• Keep your login details safe. You are responsible for everything done in your account, including by people you invite.
• The owner controls billing and who is on the team. Each person you invite agrees to receive the alerts they choose, by text, email, push notification or phone call.
• The details you give us, including your business name, address and contact details, must be accurate and kept up to date.

3. AI, mistakes and who is responsible

• Oscar uses speech recognition, speech synthesis and large language models from third-party providers. These are probabilistic: they don’t always do what they are told, and they can produce answers that are wrong, incomplete or not in your setup. We take reasonable steps to keep Oscar to your setup, but we can’t guarantee it.
• Oscar talks to callers on your behalf, not ours. What he says, quotes, books or agrees on a call is between your business and your caller. If he gets something wrong, such as a price, an arrival time, a booking, a promise or a piece of advice, it’s up to you to correct it with your customer, and ZII is not a party to that.
• Call summaries, transcripts, urgency flags, lead values, scores and reports are generated automatically and may be inaccurate. Use them as a guide, not as a record you rely on without checking. Listen to the recording when it matters.
• Don’t rely on Oscar as the only way you find out about urgent work. Keep your own way of noticing missed or urgent calls, such as checking your inbox and your backup number.
• Oscar doesn’t give legal, medical, financial, safety or other professional advice, and you must not set him up to.
• Subject to section 15, we are not liable for any loss caused by what Oscar says or does on a call, by a call, transfer, text or alert that is missed, delayed, misrouted or wrong, or by an inaccurate booking, quote, transcript or summary.

4. Your setup

Oscar works from the setup you publish, including what we draft for you from your website. You are responsible for checking and keeping it accurate, including prices, fees, service areas, hours, transfer numbers and safety rules, and for making sure it is lawful for your business. Review practice calls before you publish changes. Publishing a setup means you approve it.

5. Callers, recording, texts and the law

• Oscar is set up to tell every caller the call is recorded, and to say he is a virtual receptionist if asked. You must not configure him to deny being an AI or to hide recording. If you turn the recording notice off, recording is turned off too.
• You are responsible for complying with the laws that apply to your calls and texts, including call-recording and consent laws, AI disclosure laws, telemarketing and texting laws (such as the TCPA), consumer protection and privacy laws, and the rules of your trade. Our default notices and settings are a convenience, not legal advice.
• You must have the right to receive and handle the calls you forward to us, and to text the callers Oscar texts on your behalf. Texts are only sent to people who called you, and anyone who replies STOP isn’t texted again.
• You authorise us to register your business with phone carriers where texting rules require it, using the details you give us. Carriers may filter or block messages, and we aren’t responsible when they do.
• Oscar makes no marketing or sales calls to consumers. The only calls he places are alerts to your own team.

6. Acceptable use

You must not use Oscar, or let anyone else use it:

• for unlawful, deceptive, threatening or harassing calls or texts, or to impersonate another person or business;
• to collect payment card numbers, bank details, Social Security numbers, passwords, health records that need HIPAA protection, or other sensitive or special category data;
• in place of 911 or other public emergency services, as a crisis or medical triage line, or for a service aimed mainly at children;
• for a business you don’t own or aren’t authorised to represent, including when you try the instant demo with a website;
• to copy, resell, reverse engineer or overload the service, to get around its limits or security, or to build a competing product.

7. Phone numbers and call forwarding

• The numbers we give you are leased from our carriers. They aren’t your property. While your account is active you can ask to port a number away, where the carrier allows it.
• You set up and maintain call forwarding with your own phone carrier, and you pay any charges they make. We aren’t responsible for calls lost through forwarding settings, carrier outages, spam filtering or call-labelling by carriers.
• We may change or replace a number if a carrier or regulator requires it. We’ll tell you first where we can.

8. Plans and billing

• You can try Oscar on a free demo before signing up. After you sign up, you choose a plan and add a payment method to start a 3-day free trial. Oscar doesn’t answer your calls until you do. Nothing is charged during the trial. If you don’t cancel before it ends, your plan starts and your payment method is charged for it.
• Plans are billed in US dollars, monthly or yearly in advance, and renew automatically for the same period until you cancel. By adding a payment method you authorise us to charge it for your plan, renewals, extra minutes and taxes. Included minutes reset every month, even on a yearly plan. Calls under 15 seconds, spam, practice calls and your team’s own calls don’t use minutes.
• Extra minutes beyond your allowance are billed at the rate shown in Billing unless you choose to stop answering at your limit. We text you at 80% and 100% of your minutes.
• Upgrades start straight away and you pay the difference. Downgrades start at your next renewal. Prices may change with at least 30 days’ notice, starting from your next renewal.
• If a payment fails we’ll retry it and tell you. If it still isn’t paid we may suspend the service until it is.
• If you started a paid plan with our earlier first-month offer, you can ask for a full refund from Billing within 30 days of starting. We refund every payment made in that time, and your plan ends straight away. This applies once per business.
• Sales tax is added where it applies. Apart from the first-month guarantee above, fees are non-refundable except where the law says otherwise. Please contact us before disputing a charge with your bank.

9. Who provides Oscar and who bills you

• We may transfer this agreement, your account and your subscription to a company in our group (a company that controls ZII, is controlled by ZII or is under common control with it), or to a business that takes over Oscar through a merger, acquisition, reorganisation or sale of assets. We’ll tell the account owner by email or in the app before it happens. Your consent isn’t needed.
• From the date we give, that company provides Oscar to you under these terms, and charges you. Your payment method, billing authorisation, plan, prices and data carry over. The name on your card statement and invoices may change.
• A company in our group may also collect payments or issue invoices on our behalf at any time.
• You may not transfer this agreement without our written consent.

10. Cancelling and suspension

You can cancel any time in Billing. Oscar keeps answering until the end of the period you have paid for. Turn off call forwarding with your carrier before then, or missed calls will go to a number that no longer answers. We keep your phone number for 60 days after cancellation, then release it. You can export your calls before you go.

We may suspend or end the service if you don’t pay, break these terms, or use Oscar in a way that puts callers, carriers or us at risk, or if a carrier, provider or regulator requires it. Where we can, we’ll warn you first. We may also stop offering Oscar altogether with at least 30 days’ notice, and refund any fees paid for the period after it stops.

11. Your data

You own your setup, calls, recordings, transcripts and contacts. You give us permission to use them, and the content we draft from your website, to provide, secure and support Oscar, as set out in our data processing agreement, which forms part of these terms. Recordings and transcripts are kept for the retention period you choose in Setup, then deleted.

We may create aggregated or de-identified information from use of the service, such as call volumes, outcomes and quality measures, that doesn’t identify you, your callers or your team. We own that information and may use it to run and improve Oscar.

12. Our service

ZII owns Oscar, including the software, templates, voices, prompts and everything we build. Apart from the right to use Oscar under these terms, nothing transfers to you. If you send us feedback or ideas, we can use them without owing you anything.

13. Third-party services

Oscar relies on carriers, AI model providers and other suppliers, and connects to services you choose, like Google Calendar, Stripe and your field-service software. Their own terms apply to your use of the services you choose. We aren’t responsible for the availability, accuracy or acts of third-party services, and we may change the suppliers we use.

14. Disclaimer

Except as these terms expressly say, Oscar is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the extent the law allows, we exclude all other warranties, conditions and terms, whether express or implied, including those of satisfactory quality, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy and non-infringement.

15. Liability

• Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that can’t be limited by law.
• Otherwise, we are not liable, whether in contract, tort (including negligence) or otherwise, for: lost profits, revenue, jobs, customers or goodwill; lost or corrupted data; loss caused by a missed, delayed or mishandled call, transfer, text or alert; anything Oscar says or does on a call; damage to property or harm that follows a delayed or missed response to a caller; the acts of your callers, staff or third-party services; or any indirect or consequential loss.
• Our total liability for all claims in any 12 months is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the event that caused the claim.
• You agree these limits are reasonable given the price of Oscar and the nature of AI, and that you are best placed to insure your own business against these risks.
• Any claim must be brought within one year of the event that caused it.

16. Your responsibility to us

You will defend ZII and compensate it for any claim, fine, penalty, loss and reasonable cost (including legal fees) arising from a claim by a caller, customer, team member, carrier, regulator or anyone else that relates to: your setup or instructions; calls and texts handled or sent on your behalf; your business, prices, work or promises; your breach of these terms; or your breach of any law, including recording, consent, texting, privacy and consumer protection laws.

17. Changes

We may update these terms and change or remove features. For material changes to these terms we’ll tell the account owner by email at least 30 days before they apply. Continuing to use Oscar after that means you accept the new terms. If you don’t accept them, you can cancel before they apply.

18. General

• These terms, the DPA and anything we agree in writing are the whole agreement between us about Oscar. If the DPA and these terms conflict on data protection, the DPA wins.
• If any part of these terms can’t be enforced, the rest still applies, and that part applies to the greatest extent the law allows.
• If we don’t enforce a right straight away, we can still enforce it later.
• We aren’t responsible for delays or failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control, such as outages at carriers, cloud or AI providers, internet failures, cyberattacks, power cuts, natural disasters, war or changes in law.
• We may send notices to the account owner’s email address or show them in the app. You agree to receive them electronically.
• Only you and ZII (and any company this agreement is transferred to under section 9) have rights under these terms. Your callers and anyone else have no right to enforce them, including under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.
• We are independent contractors. Nothing in these terms makes us partners, employer and employee, or agents of each other, except that Oscar handles calls on your behalf as described.
• We may name your business as a customer. Email us if you’d rather we didn’t.
• You must not use Oscar where trade sanctions or export controls forbid it.
• Sections that by their nature should continue after the agreement ends, including those on fees owed, data, liability, your responsibility to us and law, continue.

19. Law

These terms and any dispute about them are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

Who we are

Oscar is provided by ZII Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 05989125). Our registered office is Orchard Dene, Heath Road, Boughton Monchelsea, Maidstone, Kent, ME17 4JN. Questions about these terms or your data: [email protected]. Anything else: contact us.