Terms of use

1. What this software is

JARVIS is an open source desktop application for Windows, downloaded and run on the user's own machine. It is not a service, a platform, an account or a subscription. The author operates no server, the software depends on no infrastructure of the author's, and there is no back end for it to call.

Everything the software does happens between your machine and a server you choose and control. The author is not a party to that connection and does not see it.

2. The licence

The JARVIS code is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The binding text is the LICENSE file in the repository, also published by the Apache Software Foundation. What follows summarises it and does not replace it.

• What you get: a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty free licence to use, reproduce, modify, publish and distribute the work in source or object form, and to sublicense it, together with an express patent grant from the contributors (section 3).
• What redistribution asks of you (section 4): include a copy of the licence, state the files you changed, keep the copyright, patent, trademark and attribution notices, and carry the contents of the NOTICE file with them.
• What you do not get (section 6): any right in the licensor's names, trademarks or service marks. Clause 9 below covers what that means in practice.
• The patent grant terminates for you if you bring patent litigation alleging that this work infringes a patent (section 3).

The project also ships a NOTICE file collecting the notices that other components' licences require. Section 4(d) of Apache 2.0 obliges you to carry it with any redistribution.

3. Third party components and their licences

The Apache 2.0 licence covers only the code written in this project. The libraries, models and fonts it uses carry their own licences, which apply to you directly. The important ones are:

• The pretrained openWakeWord models, including hey_jarvis, are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: non-commercial, with attribution and share-alike. The project states this is due to datasets with unknown or restrictive licensing in the training data. The openWakeWord code itself is Apache 2.0.
• Whisper, faster-whisper and CTranslate2 are MIT, as are the converted weights published on Hugging Face.
• Piper is MIT. The two voices used carry their own training data terms: en_GB-alan-medium derives from the Mimic 3 voice set published under CC BY-SA 4.0, and ar_JO-kareem-medium derives from an Arabic training set that declares no explicit licence. Anyone intending commercial use should check each voice's model card and its data source.
• Flutter and Dart are BSD-3-Clause, and the pub.dev packages used are MIT or BSD per package.
• ONNX Runtime, NumPy, sounddevice and websockets are MIT or BSD-3-Clause.
• NVIDIA cuBLAS is a proprietary component redistributed under NVIDIA's own terms. It is optional and is installed only with the GPU option.
• The fonts Orbitron, Rajdhani, JetBrains Mono and Noto Sans Arabic are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
• Hermes Agent is a separate MIT licensed project by Nous Research. JARVIS neither distributes nor installs it; you install it on your own server, and your use of it is governed by its own terms.

What this means in practice: you may use, modify and redistribute JARVIS under Apache 2.0, provided you meet the section 4 conditions set out above. If you intend commercial use, however, the build that carries the openWakeWord wake word model falls under a non-commercial restriction. The remedy is either to disable the wake word or to replace the model with one licensed for commercial use and trained on data that permits it. The rest of the software, including the interface, the Hermes connection and the readings, is not subject to that restriction.

4. Your server, your commands, your responsibility

JARVIS passes what you type or say to a Hermes agent on your server, and that agent runs real commands on a real system. The commands that run are the result of your request and the behaviour of the agent you configured.

You alone are responsible for:

• having the right to access the server you point at, and to run commands on it.
• whatever those commands do: changing or deleting data, or taking a service down.
• your own backups. JARVIS takes none and has no undo.
• complying with the law where you are, and with your hosting provider's terms.
• the security of the credentials you enter. The SSH password and the Hermes key go to the Windows credential store on your machine, are not written to any configuration file, and are sent nowhere.

5. The language models Hermes uses

JARVIS contains no large language model and connects to no model provider. All language reasoning happens in Hermes on your server, and Hermes talks to whichever provider you configured in it. That relationship is yours: the provider's terms, its prices and its policy on the text sent to it apply to you directly, and JARVIS has no part in them.

The speech models inside JARVIS, meaning the wake word, the speech to text and the speech out, all run on your machine and send nothing anywhere. The detail is in the privacy notice.

6. No warranty

Apache License 2.0, section 7. Disclaimer of Warranty. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, Licensor provides the Work (and each Contributor provides its Contributions) on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied, including, without limitation, any warranties or conditions of TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY, or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. You are solely responsible for determining the appropriateness of using or redistributing the Work and assume any risks associated with Your exercise of permissions under this License.

In practice that means there is no warranty that it will run without fault, that it will stay compatible with future versions of Hermes, or that the readings and transcripts are accurate in every case.

7. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, the author and copyright holders are not liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in contract, tort or otherwise, arising from the software, its use, or any other dealings with it. That includes, without limitation, data loss, service downtime, and any charges you incur with a model provider or a hosting provider as a result of commands your agent ran.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain warranties to be excluded or liability to be limited. Where that is so, these clauses apply to the extent that law permits and the remainder continues to apply.

8. No support, no undertaking to maintain, no contact

There is no technical support, no contact email, no service level agreement, and no promise of future releases or security updates. The GitHub repository is the only place anything is tracked, and opening an issue there creates no obligation to reply or to fix.

The author does not ask for user data and does not want it. Do not send credentials, or logs containing server addresses or keys.

9. Trademarks, and the question of the name

This is an independent, free, non-commercial personal project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or approved by any party named here, and in particular not by Marvel Characters, Inc. or The Walt Disney Company. It ships no artwork, character, likeness, dialogue, audio or logo belonging to either. Its interface, icon, sound cues and pixel art are generated from source in this repository.

The mark

"JARVIS" is a registered trademark of Marvel Characters, Inc. in the United States, registration number 4737881, registered 19 May 2015 and renewed in May 2025. It covers, among other things, software for use as a voice controlled personal digital assistant, which is the same category of goods this project falls into.

None of that is a licence, and none of it authorises use of the mark.

What that means for you

For a user, none of this applies. Downloading, cloning, building and running it on your own machine raise no trademark question. Trademark law governs marks used to identify goods in trade, and a user is not doing that.

If you fork it and keep the name, section 6 of the Apache 2.0 licence gives you the code and no rights in the name. Should a rights holder ever object, the realistic consequence is a request to rename, and TRADEMARKS lists every file to change.

Selling it, or building a commercial product on it, is the case where the name genuinely matters. The one enforcement action on the public record involving software named Jarvis was directed at a funded commercial product marketing itself as an AI assistant, which renamed in 2022. Anyone going that way should take their own legal advice, and should note that the bundled wake word model carries its own non-commercial restriction under clause 3 above.

The project earns nothing from the name. It is given away free, with no advertising, no sponsorship, no paid tier, no donation link, and no trademark application of its own.

Other marks referred to

• Nous Research and the Hermes Agent project. The Hermes mark appears on this site to identify the project JARVIS connects to, which is nominative use and implies no sponsorship or partnership.
• Microsoft (Windows), NVIDIA (CUDA, cuBLAS), Google (Flutter, Dart), the Python Software Foundation, Docker, GitHub, OpenAI, JetBrains, Canonical, Hugging Face and SYSTRAN. Their names are used only to identify a component or to describe compatibility, and each mark belongs to its owner.

If you own a mark referred to here and believe this notice is inaccurate, or that any use is improper, open an issue on the project's GitHub repository. A notice is easiest to act on when it identifies the mark and its registration, the material at issue, and the sender's authority to act for the owner. Properly identified concerns from rights holders are taken seriously and answered.

10. Lawful use and export controls

You use this software at your own risk and under the law that applies to you. Do not use it to reach systems you are not authorised to reach. The software includes standard cryptographic components through SSH, which may be subject to export or import restrictions in some countries, and complying with those is your responsibility.

11. Children

This is a server administration tool aimed at developers and system administrators. It is not directed at children, and it collects no data from anyone of any age.

12. Changes to these terms

This document may be updated as the project changes, and the date of the last update appears at the top. Every change is recorded in the repository's history on GitHub and can be reviewed there. The version you downloaded the software under continues to govern that copy, through the Apache 2.0 licence shipped with it.

13. General

If any clause here is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. This document creates no services contract, agency, partnership or employment relationship between you and the author. The Apache 2.0 licence is the primary source of rights and obligations for the code, and what is written here explains it and its limits without replacing it. Where this document and the licence conflict, the licence text prevails.