Call recording
When a business uses our Voice Answering Service, we answer the calls they do not pick up. We take the caller's name and what they need, and we send it straight to the owner. Part of that means recording what the caller says. This page explains what we record, who hears it, where it goes, and how long we keep it.
What the caller hears
Every call opens with a recording notice. Before anything is recorded, the caller hears this:
Thanks for calling, this is Front desk [Business Name]. This call is recorded. May I have your name and reason for calling?
Outside the business's stated hours, the caller hears the same notice in an after-hours version of the greeting. California is a two-party consent state, which is why that notice is spoken out loud at the start of the call rather than buried on a page like this one. Recording does not begin until it has been said. A business can change the wording of their greeting. The recording notice cannot be removed from it.
When the caller finishes, they hear this:
Got it, thanks for calling. We have your details and someone will call you back shortly.
What we record, and what we do not
We record the caller's message. That is all.
We are not on the line when a business and their customer actually speak. When someone calls a business using our service, that business's phone rings first. If they pick up, the call never reaches us and nothing is recorded. We only answer, and only record, when the call goes unanswered, the line is busy, or the phone is off.
We do not record the business owner. We do not record conversations between an owner and their customer. We do not listen to calls as they happen.
If a caller hangs up without leaving a message
Sometimes a caller hangs up during the greeting, or stays on the line without saying anything. There is no usable message to send in that case, so we send the caller a text instead, letting them know the business will get back to them. That text names the business, not us, and carries the same opt-out options as any message we send. Full detail is on our SMS consent page.
Where the recording goes
Two companies touch the audio and we name both.
Twilio carries the call and stores the recording. In their own words, recordings are stored in encrypted cloud storage.
Deepgram converts the recording into text, so the owner can read what a caller said instead of having to stop and listen.
That is the whole list. The recording goes nowhere else. It is never sold or shared, and nobody outside those two services and the business the caller was trying to reach has access to it.
We do not let it be used for model training
Every request we send to Deepgram carries an instruction not to use the audio to train or improve their models. That instruction is part of the request itself, on every single call. It is not a preference we set once and hope holds.
Who can hear it
The business owner, and nobody else.
When we send an owner a message, we include a link so they can play the caller's own voice. That link lives on our own domain and opens without a login, which means it works for anyone who has it. Owners should treat it like any other private link.
Access on our side is limited to TAiOA staff who need it to support the service, which today is one person.
How long we keep it
Recordings are deleted automatically thirty days after the call. That runs nightly on a schedule, so it does not depend on anyone remembering.
The message we send an owner is theirs. It arrives as a text or an email, and what happens to it afterwards is up to them. We cannot delete a copy sitting in someone else's inbox.
Our own internal system logs may hold transcript text for a period while we monitor and troubleshoot the service. Those logs sit on our own server and are not reachable by anyone outside TAiOA.
Questions about a call or a recording, email hello@theaiofficeassistant.com and a real person will answer.