Voice logging is the practice of regularly recording telephone conversations. Business sectors which often do voice logging include public safety (e.g.
9-1-1
, usually written 911, is an emergency telephone number for the United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Palau, Argentina, Philippines, Jordan, as well as the North American Numbering Plan (NANP), one of eight N11 codes. Like other emergency nu ...
and emergency response systems), customer service call centers (conversations are recorded for quality assurance purposes), and finance (e.g. telephone-initiated stock trades are recorded for compliance purposes). Although voice logging is usually performed on conventional telephone lines, it is also frequently used for recording open microphones (e.g. on a stock trading floor) and for broadcast radio.
Early voice loggers recorded
POTS lines onto analog magnetic tape. As telephony became more digital, so did voice loggers, and starting in the 1990s, voice loggers digitized the audio using a
codec
A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder.
In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or da ...
and recorded to digital tape. With modern
VoIP
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet t ...
systems, many voice loggers now simply store calls to a file on a hard drive.
History
The original voice logging system was a large analog
tape recorder
An audio tape recorder, also known as a tape deck, tape player or tape machine or simply a tape recorder, is a sound recording and reproduction device that records and plays back sounds usually using magnetic tape for storage. In its present- ...
developed by Magnasync in 1950. In 1953, Magnasync Corporation sold 300 voice loggers to the U.S. Air Force.
Types of voice loggers
* Analog tape: the oldest models use
reel-to-reel
Reel-to-reel audio tape recording, also called open-reel recording, is magnetic tape audio recording in which the recording tape is spooled between reels. To prepare for use, the ''supply reel'' (or ''feed reel'') containing the tape is plac ...
tape to record multiple phone lines to multiple tracks on the tape. Simple recorders also exist which use individual
cassette
Cassette may refer to:
Technology
* Cassette tape (or ''musicassette'', ''audio cassette'', ''cassette tape'', or ''tape''), a worldwide standard for analog audio recording and playback
** Cassette single (or "Cassingle"), a music single in th ...
or
microcassette
The Microcassette (often written generically as microcassette) is an audio storage medium, introduced by Olympus in 1969.
It has the same width of magnetic tape as the Compact Cassette but in a cassette roughly one quarter the size. By using t ...
tape recorders on each individual phone. Later analog systems recorded 64 simultaneous phone calls onto a
VHS cartridge.
* Digital tape (or recordable disk): These are the most commonly used today. They typically consist of proprietary hardware which is attached to the trunk lines for the enterprise (typically
POTS,
T1, or
E1 lines). Later systems often consist of a PC motherboard with specialized interface hardware in a PCI slot. Digital systems also record detailed metadata about recorded calls, including start/stop timestamps, extension number or name, dialed
DTMF
Dual-tone multi-frequency signaling (DTMF) is a telecommunication signaling system using the voice-frequency band over telephone lines between telephone equipment and other communications devices and switching centers. DTMF was first developed ...
tones,
Caller ID
Caller identification (Caller ID) is a telephone service, available in analog and digital telephone systems, including voice over IP (VoIP), that transmits a caller's telephone number to the called party's telephone equipment when the call is ...
,
DNIS Dialed Number Identification Service (DNIS) is a service offered by telecommunications companies to corporate clients which identifies the originally dialed telephone number of an inbound call. The client may use this information for call routing t ...
, and more. Many systems allow administrators to listen to live conversations or to access records from any remote location over a LAN. In addition, analytical tools are available which allow searching and quality reporting.
* Software-only systems: These systems may be all-software running on industry-standard servers, or use hardware such as a sound card on a PC, to do the work of recording and monitoring telephone calls. Some are simple single-user systems that typically only require a user to install the software on their PC, and use some type of simple adapter to connect the PC to a phone. However this type of software can usually only record a single line at a time, and is much more limited in features. Business-class recording and monitoring systems enable businesses of all sizes to deploy centralized call recording and monitoring for IP telephony systems.
See also
*
Call-recording hardware
Call recording hardware, or a telephone recorder, is hardware that can be used to record telephone conversations. Call recording hardware is most often used by law enforcement, lawyers, journalist, and call centers to record phone transaction w ...
*
Dictation machine
A dictation machine is a sound recording device most commonly used to record speech for playback or to be typed into print. It includes digital voice recorders and tape recorder.
The name "Dictaphone" is a trademark of the company of the same n ...
*
Telephone tapping
Telephone tapping (also wire tapping or wiretapping in American English) is the monitoring of telephone and Internet-based conversations by a third party, often by covert means. The wire tap received its name because, historically, the monitorin ...
References
External links
History of Voice RecordersSupport for Discontinued Call RecordersVoice Logger Retrieval
{{DEFAULTSORT:Voice Logging
Recording devices