Terms ་ Kerog for iPhone

Terms of Use

Last updated 19 September 2026 ་ Plain words first, the formal wording after.

Kerog is free, and given as it is. There is no licence to buy, no account to keep, and no advertising. It is built out of models and dictionaries released by other people, each credited by name and used under its own terms — see Other people's work below.

It will get translations wrong. The models are small enough to fit on a phone, and it shows. Read the English as a rough first pass and check it against the word-by-word gloss underneath, which is what the gloss is there for.

Do not rely on it alone where being wrong would matter. Medical, legal, financial or ritual instructions, anything you are about to sign, and anything you are about to say on someone else's behalf — have a person who knows the language check it.

What you are agreeing to

By installing or using Kerog you accept what is on this page. If you do not, the remedy is the ordinary one: delete the app. Because Kerog is distributed through the App Store, Apple's standard licence agreement also applies, and where anything here is narrower than that agreement, that agreement wins.

The price

There is none. No purchase, no subscription, no trial that ends, no feature held back, no advertising, and nothing collected about you to sell instead — see the Privacy Policy, which says so in more detail. This is a one-person project for a community too small to build a business on, which is exactly why it is free, and the intention is that it stays that way.

Accuracy, said properly

Kerog translates with machine-learning models chosen to fit inside a phone alongside everything else it needs. They are meaningfully less accurate than models running on a server, and they fail most often on names, rare and archaic spellings, honorific registers, and long sentences. Transcription of speech and reading of photographed pages fail in their own ways: background noise, unfamiliar handwriting, a curled page.

The word-by-word gloss is the honest layer. It comes from published dictionaries and shows you the range of meanings, including where dictionaries disagree with each other. When a sentence comes out wrong, the gloss is what lets you see why. It is still a dictionary, not a reading: choosing which sense is meant is your work, or your teacher's.

Nothing Kerog produces is a certified, professional or authoritative translation, and it is not offered as one.

The Cloud (Monlam AI)

Switching on a Cloud task in Settings sends that task's content to Monlam AI, a service this project does not own, run or control. Their availability, their accuracy and their handling of what they receive are theirs, on their terms, at monlam.ai. Kerog uses their free public service, which carries no promise that it will be there tomorrow; when it is not, the task falls back to your phone. Every switch is off until you turn it on. The Privacy Policy sets out exactly what gets sent.

Other people's work

Kerog is built almost entirely out of work by other people — speech, translation, OCR and speech-synthesis models from OpenPecha, Meta AI, the Buddhist Digital Resource Center and others, and around 265,000 dictionary entries compiled by Christian Steinert from the labour of Rangjung Yeshe, Ives Waldo, Jim Valby, Dan Martin, Tsepak Rigdzin and others.

Each is credited by name in the app and on the landing page. That work belongs to the people who made it and is used on their terms, which these terms do not override — none of it is this project's to relicense, and nothing here claims ownership of anything that is not its own.

If you are one of the authors and something here is credited wrongly, or used in a way you did not intend, write to the address below — it will be corrected or removed, and that is a standing offer, not a formality.

What you may not do with it

Very little is off limits, but for completeness: do not use Kerog to break the law; do not present its output as a certified or human translation; do not pull it apart to attack the services it talks to; and do not extract and redistribute the bundled models or dictionaries, which are not this project's to give away.

No warranty

Kerog is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. It is not guaranteed to be uninterrupted, error-free, or to produce correct results.

Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Ramon Blanquer is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss arising from your use of Kerog — including loss arising from a translation, transcription or reading that turned out to be wrong.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations of liability, and nothing here removes a right you hold that cannot be waived. In particular, if you are a consumer in the European Union or the United Kingdom, your statutory consumer rights are unaffected by anything on this page.

Changes, and endings

These terms may change as the app does; the date at the top moves when they do, and continuing to use Kerog after that means accepting the version then published. The app may change too — models get replaced as better open ones appear, which is the point. You may stop at any time by deleting it.

Getting in touch

One address, answered by the person who wrote the app: blanquer.ramon@gmail.com. Reports of a word read badly, a page misread, or a model worth trying are genuinely what this improves from.