West-Press Printing Health Care CENTRAL ARIZONA COLLEGE DIRECTOR OF HEALTH INFORMATION MANAGEMENT Finance and Accounting Charles E. Gillman Company Accounting Specialist Trades/Construction RANCHO RESORT MAINTANANCE POSITION Health Care Sierra Tucson Eating Disorders Program Coordinator Health Care Dependable Health Services Physical Therapists Administrative & Professional Jorgensen Brooks Group Counselor BusinessPay service records calls for later retrieval onlineThe Record (Hackensack, N.J.)
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 09.30.2007
Ever wish you'd been able to record a phone call easily, without any extra equipment attached to your phone?
There's a fledgling Internet-based service that records U.S. domestic calls and saves them on a Web site so you can listen later, or e-mails the audio file to someone.
Co-founded by Roland Chemtob of New York City and Peter Tilles of Princeton, N.J., RecordMyCalls.com went live in May.
They have fewer than 500 customers and are still tweaking the service, Chemtob said. But they've signed up clients that include the United Nations, Northwestern University and one large corporation that records calls to its franchise owners to make sure they are friendly and courteous when answering the phone. That customer chose the Internet-based service in part to save the expense of buying a recording system, Chemtob said.
Here's how RecordMy-Calls.com works:
First, you register and give credit-card information. To record a call, I dialed an 800 number and was prompted to enter my account number, a password and then the number I wanted to call. I dialed my husband's cell phone, and when he answered I told him I was recording the call.
"Oh, geez! You just broke a number of laws by not informing me," he joked.
Actually, I told him, in New York and New Jersey you aren't required to get the permission of the person you are calling — the RecordMyCalls.com Web site lays out the rules, which differ depending on the state (some states do require that both parties consent to being recorded). Even though you dial an 800 number, your phone number shows up on the recipient's phone.
The service does not let you record incoming calls, only outgoing.
But Chemtob said incoming-call recording should be available in the next "three to five months." The company also is working on a range of new features including one that will allow users to copy voice-mail recordings and preserve them in their RecordMyCalls.com Web account.
As for my call, I hung up and then clicked on the Web site, and there it was, listing the number I dialed and the time of the call. I easily opened the file using Windows Media Player (the service saves them in a WAV or MP3 file format) and was soon listening to a recording of the conversation.
Sending the conversation file via e-mail was also easy. The person receiving the e-mail clicks on a link to listen to a streaming version of the call so the large files don't clog his or her in-box.
My call to my husband was generally high quality, but there were some instances where the call seemed to break up, and we seemed to talk over each other. Chemtob said the firm has been working on a minor issue to address the problem. "We're still in early stages," he said.
The company charges a monthly rate that basically buys you storage space on the company server for your files, plus a per-minute charge. A five-minute call can cost up to $1, and the files are fairly large (my 4 1/2-minute call was about 4.25 Mb).
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