Record live audio

Ok, here’s a strange idea. We recently had an incident in the store where a customer and an employee ended up in a ‘he-said-she-said’ situation. After dealing with the customer issue and debriefing with our employee I had an idea. In this case our employee saw this issue coming when she dealt with the customer initially, verified multiple times the customer’s info, and it still went sideways - a recording would have helped here.

What if we could hit a button on the phone (Yealink T46G) and have Freepbx pickup the speaker phone and record audio.

We already have call recording in place and it’s helped on occasion, but every now an then one of ‘those’ customers walks in…

How would I set this up?

There are a couple of ways to do this:

  1. Set up the extensions in the system to allow for On-demand recording. The “*1” Feature Code (YMMV, check your Feature Code list) will toggle recording on and off.
  2. Set up all of your extensions so they record all of the time and delete the old ones after a ‘reasonable period’ (like 30 days). There are several requests on the forums that use variations on the old classic:

find /usr/spool/asterisk/monitor -date +30d -exec rm {} \;

Once again, YMMV and you’ll need to double check all of the syntax to make sure it’s going to delete the right stuff. Either of those should help you get where you want to go.

The technical side is easy. Create a Conference without a PIN, with Quiet Mode and Record Conference set to Yes. Program a spare BLF key on the phone to call the conference as a speed dial.

Legal side, maybe not. In most states and countries that require consent of all parties to record a phone conversation, that applies to in-person conversations as well. Ask your lawyer whether a posted sign is sufficient.

Business side, maybe not. If you have a security camera recording continuously anyhow, setting it up to also capture audio may be a simpler and more robust solution.

Thanks for the idea, I did not think of a conferenc!.

Luckily, I’m in Canada and our law stipulates that as long as one side knows there is a recording it’s legal.

Ok, I set up the conference and got recordings set up. Do you happen to know where it will drop the recordings? It says it has to be downloaded by logging into the backend, but doesn’t mention where they might be stored.

If you view CDRs, both playback and download links should appear for these calls.

Actual location is in e.g. /var/spool/asterisk/monitor/2020/08/12/

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