Terms of Use

These terms are between you and Manoa, Inc. ("we", "us"), the maker of Skipper. By using the app or this site, you're agreeing to them. If you don't, don't use Skipper. No hard feelings.

Drive safely. Seriously.

Skipper is designed to be heard, not watched. That's the entire point of it: the Skipper talks so you can keep your eyes on the road and the lake instead of on a screen. Set up your drive before you put the car in gear.

• Never operate the app while driving. Don't read the screen, don't tap the map, don't pick a stop. If you need to touch it, pull over somewhere safe.
• Skipper is not a navigation app. It doesn't give driving directions and it isn't built to be followed. Use a real navigation app, or a map, or your eyes.
• The road is the authority. Obey traffic laws, road signs, closures, and conditions always, and especially over anything Skipper says. If the Skipper cheerfully describes a viewpoint and there's a closure sign in front of it, the sign wins.
• Pull-offs, viewpoints, and stops are suggestions, not assessments. We haven't inspected them. Whether it's safe or legal to stop somewhere is your call, in the moment, with your own eyes.

You are responsible for your driving. Nothing in the app changes that.

About the narration

The Skipper's stories are AI-generated narration, grounded in public sources: mostly Wikipedia, plus Wikidata, Macrostrat, and Google Places. We work reasonably hard at accuracy: the stories are built from curated fact sheets rather than invented, every clip is checked against its sources before it ships, and a place with thin sources gets a scenic remark instead of a story, because silence beats a made-up battle.

Even so: it can be wrong. Sources go stale, facts get contested, and an AI narrator can misread a good source with total confidence. Treat the Skipper the way you'd treat a charming uncle who has read a lot: enjoyable, frequently right, not a citation. Don't rely on it for anything that matters, and please don't repeat it as fact at a trivia night without checking.

He's also a corny old tour guide by design. The jokes are jokes. Any opinion he offers is a bit, not a position of Manoa, Inc.

Planning a drive is a live conversation with an AI

The narration above is recorded in advance. Planning is not: you plan a drive by typing to the Skipper, and that half is a live AI model, run by Anthropic on our behalf. What you type in that conversation is sent to them to generate his reply. We don't keep the conversation. The Privacy Policy sets out exactly what travels with it and what doesn't.

Two things we'll ask of you there. Keep it about the drive: don't type anything into it you wouldn't hand to a third party: passwords, payment details, someone else's personal information, or anything you aren't free to share. And don't try to make him misbehave: no working the model for its instructions, no using the conversation as a general-purpose assistant, and no automating it.

His replies are generated, so the accuracy caveat above applies here too, with one useful difference. He can only offer you places from a list we curated by hand, and that list is enforced on our side, not left to his good judgement. So he cannot send you somewhere that doesn't exist, and when he says he doesn't know a place, that is the honest answer rather than a failure.

Planning is free and unmetered, and we mean to keep it that way; a credit is only ever spent when you tell him to build the drive. Because every message does cost us real money, we may rate-limit it, or suspend access, where it's being used abusively or automatically. If that ever catches you by mistake, email us and we'll sort it out.

Who can use Skipper

You need to be 18 or older to make an account. If you're between 13 and 18, or under the age of majority where you live, you can use Skipper under the supervision of a parent or guardian who agrees to these terms on your behalf. Younger kids are extremely welcome in the back seat; the account just isn't theirs.

Your account

Planning a drive works without an account; making one needs it. You're responsible for what happens under your account, so keep your sign-in code, and your password if you set one, to yourself. Give us an email address that's actually yours and keep it current: we sign you in by emailing a code to it, so it isn't just how you get back in, it's how you get in at all.

You can delete your account from Settings at any time. It's immediate and it's total; see the Privacy Policy for exactly what gets erased.

Credits

Generating a drive costs a credit. New accounts get an allotment of free ones. Here's the honest shape of that:

• A credit is a limited, personal, non-transferable license to have us generate one drive. It is not money, not a currency, not property, and not a stored-value balance.
• Credits have no cash value, can't be sold, traded, or given away, and can't be converted into anything.
• Credits are not refundable. A credit is spent when the drive is generated; that's the moment the work happens, and the work doesn't un-happen. Deleting the drive afterwards doesn't give it back.
• Deleting your account forfeits any credits you have left. Erasure is total; the ledger goes with it. Spend them first if you care about them.
• We may change the free allotment, or how credits work, for future drives. We won't retroactively take away credits you already have.

If you ever buy credits, anything you buy through the App Store is also subject to Apple's terms, and refunds for those purchases are handled by Apple under their policy.

Content and licensing

What's ours. The Skipper (the persona, the voice, the writing, the audio, the app, and this site) belongs to Manoa, Inc. We're giving you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use it for your own listening. Please don't rip the audio, redistribute it, republish it, feed it into a training set, or build a competing tour out of it.

What isn't ours. The facts underneath the stories (what happened here, and when) aren't anyone's property. Facts can't be copyrighted. What is ours is the telling: the Skipper's words, his voice, and the audio, written fresh rather than copied from a source.

We read those facts from public sources, and we credit them because it's right and because some of their licenses ask us to: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), Wikidata (CC0), Macrostrat (CC BY 4.0), and place details from Google Places under Google's terms. Every clip carries its own frozen attribution, and the full catalog with license links is in the app under Settings → Sources & Licenses. Music in the drives is separately licensed and credited in the app. If you think we've credited something wrong, or that a line of narration follows a source too closely, tell us and we'll fix it.

Using Skipper decently

Don't:

• break into it: no probing, scraping, hammering our servers, or working around the signed links on the audio;
• use someone else's account, or let someone else use yours;
• resell, rebroadcast, or commercially exploit the drives or the audio;
• use it in a way that breaks the law or endangers anyone (see: the whole first section).

If someone's doing that, we may suspend or terminate their access. We'd rather not, and it's not the kind of app that should need this paragraph, but here we are.

No warranty

Skipper is a small, stubborn labor of love, provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement, to the fullest extent the law allows.

We don't promise it'll always work, that it'll be available, that a story will trigger at exactly the right moment, that the audio will download in a Tahoe dead zone, or that everything the Skipper says is true. Regions come and go. Stories get rewritten. It might break.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Manoa, Inc. isn't liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or any loss of data, arising out of your use of Skipper. Our total liability for any claim relating to Skipper is limited to the greater of the amount you actually paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or $50.

What these limits don't touch. Nothing above limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for gross negligence or intentional misconduct, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else the law doesn't allow us to limit.

Some places don't allow these exclusions, in which case they don't apply to you to the extent their law says otherwise.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as Skipper changes. When we do, we'll revise the date at the top, and we'll flag anything significant in the app rather than quietly hoping you re-read this. Continuing to use Skipper after a change means you accept the new version.

The legal bit at the bottom

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Nevada, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute goes to the state or federal courts located in Clark County, Nevada, and we each agree those courts have jurisdiction over us. If you're a consumer whose local law gives you the right to bring a claim where you live, this doesn't take that away. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest still stands.

Contact

Questions, or something here that reads wrong to you: hello@skipper.fm. Manoa, Inc., a Delaware corporation, 1810 E Sahara Ave STE 75994, Las Vegas, NV 89104, USA.