Call recording

Recording is set per organization, not per person. An administrator picks one of three modes:

Always

Every answered call records automatically, inbound and outbound.

The agent’s choice

Agents with the right permission start and stop recording on a call themselves. An administrator can separately decide whether an agent is allowed to stop one that is already running.

Never

Recording is off and the control is hidden.

Recordings are dual-channel — each side of the conversation on its own track. The audio is held by Twilio; we store a reference to it and stream it on demand. Permission to play a recording back is separate from permission to start one, so an agent who can record is not automatically an agent who can listen to everyone else’s calls.

An organization that has never configured a recording policy is in the agent’s-choice mode. Any agent with the recording permission can record any call, at their discretion, with no announcement.

This is deliberate — it is what every account had before the policy existed, and silently switching them off would have stopped recordings people were relying on. But it means “we never set it up” is not the same as “we do not record”. If you want recording off, set it to never.

Each organization can store an announcement to be spoken to the other party before they join a recorded call.

That announcement is not currently spoken. The field is stored and editable, but nothing in the call path plays it yet. We are telling you because a customer who set one and assumed it was being played would be relying on a notice the other party never heard — and in an all-party-consent jurisdiction that is the difference between a lawful recording and an unlawful one.

Until it is fixed, any spoken notice has to come from the agent: “this call may be recorded”, said by a person, at the start of the call. If your organization is recording in a jurisdiction that requires notice, brief your agents to say it, and consider setting recording to the agent’s choice or off until then.

Making the stored announcement actually play is open work, and it is near the top.

Yours. We provide the mechanism. Whether a particular recording is lawful depends on where each party to the call is sitting, what the call is about, and what you told them — none of which we can see, and none of which we determine.

Broadly, and this is not legal advice:

Canada

A party to a conversation may record it without the other’s permission under the Criminal Code. Privacy law is stricter than that: you should tell the person that the call is being recorded, why, and give them a way to decline — which usually means an alternative to continuing on a recorded line.

Quebec

The same, plus Law 25’s requirement that consent be clear, free, informed and given for a specific purpose. A recording made for quality assurance is not thereby consented to for anything else.

United States — federal, and most states

One party’s consent is enough, and the recording party counts.

California and other all-party states

Every party has to consent. California attaches statutory damages per violation and a private right of action, and the rule extends to any call involving a mobile or cordless phone whether or not the conversation was confidential. Assume a caller may be on a mobile, because they usually are.

If you take calls across borders — and a phone number does not stop anyone dialling it — the safe operating assumption is the strictest rule that could apply.

The audio is stored by Twilio rather than by us. Playback streams through our servers so we can check the listener’s permission first, which is why a recording URL is not something that can be forwarded to someone who should not have it.

Recordings are not deleted on a schedule, and there is no per-recording delete control. Deletion is a request handled by hand — see the privacy policy. Voicemail is transcribed automatically and the transcript is stored as text alongside it.

Ringfully does not have supervisor listen-in, coaching or barge. A supervisor cannot join a call silently; joining a call means being a participant on it, visible to everyone else on the roster. If you have seen those features named on a competitor’s comparison table alongside ours, they are not ours.

Write to [TBD]. Clause 7 of the terms of service carries the contractual version of this.