People record phone calls for a myriad of reasons. Some may want to record phone calls to help remember important commitments and promises, to keep their word or to help others keep theirs. Other times, one might want to ensure that they have proof of illegal deeds or threats. Either way, you should know that "secretly" recording a telephone conversation is legal in many parts of the world and illegal in others. We cannot provide legal advice as to what is legal and what is not, as this Wikipedia article on telephone recording laws does. We are providing here ways to record telephone conversations with the caveat that it is your responsibility to check the legality of recording such conversations in your jurisdiction and obtain full and informed consent wherever that is required. At EZvoip.co, we offer primarily email-based support and as such we do not have a need for call recording, but we might sometimes record calls made to us for the purpose of training or improving service. Irrespective of what we do, law enforcement, various other government agencies and even upstream providers may record telephone conversations without our or our clients' knowledge and / or permission. We only enable this service (server-side recording) on request. By requesting and using this service, you acknowledge and agree to be solely and entirely responsible for complying with all international, federal, state, provincial and local laws and regulations in the relevant jurisdiction when using this feature, and you warrant to EZvoip.co that you are acting legally. You expressly acknowledge and agree that EZvoip.co, its providers and associates will not and cannot be held liable for any and all claim, directly and indirectly related to your recording of phone conversations. Without limitation to the Terms of Service, you agree to release, indemnify and to hold harmless EZvoip.co, its providers and associates from and against any and all claims, damages or liabilities of any kind related directly or indirectly to the recording of any phone conversation using the Service. To warn your callers, you might want to have a recorded message. You can create your own recording or you can send us your text your choice of male/female voice and we can generate the proper recording for you at $5/file (max 30 seconds). Such a warning is typically played at the beginning of a Queue, IVR or before a Ring Group. You can do such a setup yourself or we can do the first one free, with subsequent modifications at $3 each. If you are using your cell phone company services, on Android you can try using Call Recorder (4 - 192073), Automatic Call Recorder (4.2 - 623284), Call Recorder (4.3 - 144174), Super Call Recorder (4.3 - 11729), Boldbeast Call Recorder (4.0 - 2870), Contacts Phone Dialer (EC 4.6 - 125907), while on iPhone you have Call Recorder (4+ - 58), Tape-A-Call Pro ($10 4+ 1454), NoNotes (20min free/month, 4+ 300), IntCall ($0.10/min 4+ 824). You may also record iPhone calls on your Mac or MacBook via FaceTime with Audacity. For Skype, which is a proprietary VoIP service, you have MP3 Call Recorder and VodBurner. On Google Voice, with a proper setup, you may press 4 and a prerecorded notification will be played to both you and the other party, and it works only for incoming calls; you may circumvent the latter restriction via GetHuman. We indicated the rating and number of users leaving feedback at the time of writing - these numbers will definitely change in time. (The above list is not kept up to date.) The problem with the aforementioned recording methods is that they are either very expensive, or they tend to NOT work in different ways, as a perusal of user feedback on these applications reveals. Some require a "rooted" Android or "jailbroken" iPhone, others route your call through different countries and save your recording remotely, compromising your privacy, others do not record the remote party, only yourself, and finally, some only work with some devices and not with others. Those that do work may have significant limitations and may require you to pay significant amounts of money in order to access your recordings. A not-so-obvious trick employed by some of the aforementioned solutions is that they will route your call via a VoIP connection, which is what we are providing by default. This is an implicit recognition of the fact that voice call recording is best done via a VoIP connection as it is far easier to record a stream that is already made available at application level, without all the OS "security" hoopla. With SIP VoIP, you may record a phone call "client-side" in many free softphones and your call and recording is not routed anywhere else, it is saved on your smartphone or computer, locally. This is provided in Linphone on most platforms for free, on Zoiper in their Android and iPhone versions and as a paid feature on Windows and iOS. You may also record for free with Xlite on Windows and CSipSimple or SipDroid on Android. MicroSIP is probably the simplest OSS Windows-only solution; Blink is a good choice for MacOS primarily, but also Windows and Linux as it is also OSS. Some non-free apps start by offering this feature gratis, but in subsequent versions it is migrated to the paid version; for this reason, we recommend OSS (open source software) because you usually get the feature free of charge with no limitations. It may also be possible to record the phone conversation for free with the afore-linked Audacity, on desktop platforms such as Windows, Mac and Linux. For Windows, we recommend the Portable version. The open nature of our service allows a wide variety of recording options that give you complete control and privacy. This is much more difficult with plain-vanilla cell phone services. |
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