Terms of Use

What Echo is

Echo helps you learn English from real podcasts. It reads public podcast feeds, plays the episodes, shows captions where a show provides them, generates captions where it does not, translates lines, explains words you tap, and keeps the words you save so you can review them later.

It is built and run by one person. There is no company, no support team and no service desk — there is an email address, support@echopodenglish.com, and I read what arrives there.

Accounts

You can browse and listen without an account. Anything that has to be remembered — saved words, progress, followed shows — needs one, because there is nowhere else to put it.

• Sign in with Google, or with a one-time link sent to your email address.
• Use an address you can actually receive mail at. A sign-in link that goes nowhere is an account you cannot get back into.
• One person, one account. Do not share sign-in links, and do not create accounts to get around a limit.
• You are responsible for what happens under your account.

Fair use

Every generated caption and every translation costs real money to produce. The rules below exist for that reason rather than for form's sake.

Do not:

• Call Echo's API from anything other than Echo itself — no scripts, no scrapers, no bots, no wrapping it in another product.
• Automate caption generation or translation, or drive them faster than a person reading along could.
• Create more than one account, or work around the rate limits or the allowance in any other way.
• Resell, republish or redistribute the transcripts and translations Echo generates, or offer them as a service of your own.
• Try to overload the service, get at other people's accounts, or interfere with how it runs.

If an account is doing any of this, I will stop it — usually by turning that account off. There is no appeals process; there is an email address.

Podcasts belong to their publishers

Echo does not own, host or license any podcast. Shows are fetched from their public RSS feeds and played from the publisher's own servers. Copyright in every episode stays with whoever made it.

Captions and translations that Echo generates are made so you can study the episode: read along with it, look words up, review them afterwards. Use them for that. They are not yours to publish, sell or pass on, and generating them gives you no rights in the underlying episode.

To make transcription possible, Echo stores a copy of an episode's audio on its own storage. If you publish a podcast and would rather Echo did not do this with yours, email support@echopodenglish.com and I will remove it.

Transcripts and translations are machine-made

Captions are produced by speech recognition and translations by a language model. Both are wrong some of the time — a misheard word, a name spelled how it sounded, a line rendered into something the speaker did not mean, a timestamp slightly off.

Treat them as a study aid, not as a record of what was said. Do not rely on them for anything where being wrong matters: quoting someone, subtitling, reporting, legal or medical questions, or any decision of consequence. The audio is the record; Echo's text is a best effort at it.

The same goes for word definitions and for AI conversation. They are there to help you learn, and they are confidently wrong occasionally.

Availability

Echo is offered as it is. There is no uptime guarantee, no support commitment and no promised response time, because one person cannot honestly make any of those.

• The service may be down, slow, or interrupted for maintenance, without notice.
• Features may change or be removed. Some depend on outside providers, and if one of those stops working or becomes too expensive, the feature that relies on it will stop too.
• A podcast may disappear from Echo because its publisher changed or withdrew the feed. That is not something Echo controls.

The free trial and the free allowance

A new account gets seven days of everything Echo can do, including 200 minutes of caption generation and three episodes of translation for the whole of that week. Nothing is charged and nothing is asked for; when the seven days end the account carries on as a free one.

Free accounts can generate captions for 120 minutes a month, and translate three episodes a month. The month is the calendar month, UTC, and the allowance starts again on the 1st. Captions are counted in minutes rather than episodes because a long episode genuinely costs more to transcribe than a short one. Following shows, listening, reading captions a show already publishes, tapping words and saving them are not limited, and the vocabulary book has no ceiling on any plan.

Asking for the same episode again — a retry, a reload, a second device — is never counted twice.

Echo Pro changes those numbers rather than removing all of them. Translation becomes unlimited. Caption generation comes with 200 minutes a month — counted by the length of the audio, because that is how it is charged to Echo — running to the end of each calendar month. Unused minutes do not carry over.

There is also a ceiling on how much the whole service will generate in a day, shared by everybody. It exists so that no single day can cost more than Echo can afford. When it is reached, generation stops for the day for everyone, and no plan gets past it.

These numbers are set from what an episode costs rather than from anyone's real use, and they will move as that becomes clearer. If the free allowance is reduced, I will say so on the pricing page before it changes.

Paying for Echo

Echo Pro is bought over WeChat, and switched on by hand afterwards. There is no checkout on this website and no card is ever entered into it — the payment happens in WeChat, between you and me, and Echo never sees or stores a payment detail of any kind.

• Two lengths, bought once rather than subscribed to: ¥299 for six months and ¥499 for a year. Nothing renews by itself and nothing is charged again without you buying it again.
• Pro belongs to an account, not to a device, and it has an end date. When it runs out the account returns to the free allowance; nothing you saved is taken away.
• Because it is switched on by hand, tell me the email address you sign in with. Without it there is no way to know which account the payment was for.

Prices are shown in Chinese yuan and may change. A change never affects a term already paid for.

Refunds

If Echo is not what you expected, ask within 24 hours of buying and you get your money back. No reason required, and no questions from me. After that a refund is at my discretion — I would rather refund somebody than have them feel stuck with something they don't use, so it is worth asking either way.

Nothing requires this. The no-questions return period in Chinese consumer law does not cover software and downloads, which is what Echo is. The window exists because paying once for six months or a year has no “stop renewing” escape hatch — so buying by mistake, or opening it the same evening and finding it isn't for you, shouldn't be final.

It applies to a first purchase rather than to a repeat one, and the request has to come from the address the account signs in with.

Refunds will be issued through whoever took the payment, so their process and timing apply. If an account is turned off for breaking the fair-use rules above, no refund is due.

Ending it

You can stop using Echo whenever you like, and you can ask for your account and its contents to be deleted at any time — see the Deleting your account section of the Privacy Policy.

I may suspend or delete an account that breaks these terms, that is being used to abuse the service, or where the law requires it. Where there is a choice, I will write to you first.

Echo may itself stop one day. If that happens, I will give notice by email to signed-in accounts, make it possible to take your saved words with you, and refund the unused part of anything paid for.

What Echo is not liable for

Echo is provided without warranties of any kind. It is not promised to be accurate, uninterrupted, or fit for any particular purpose.

To the extent the law allows, I am not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost data, or for anything that follows from relying on a machine-made transcript or translation. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to what you have actually paid for Echo in the twelve months before the claim — which, for a free account, is nothing.

None of this limits rights you have under consumer law that cannot be signed away.

Changes to these terms

When these terms change, the date at the top changes with them. If a change materially affects what you are allowed to do or what you have paid for, I will email signed-in accounts before it takes effect. Continuing to use Echo after that means you accept the new version.

Contact

Questions about any of this, or about Echo generally: support@echopodenglish.com. One inbox, read by one person.