Hardware

Because hardware recording devices are cumbersome and expensive, they have been primarily used by law enforcement agencies. For this reason, hardware-based call recording is frequently conflated with telephone tapping

Telephone tapping

Telephone tapping is the monitoring of telephone and Internet conversations by a third party, often by covert means. The wire tap received its name because, historically, the monitoring connection was an actual electrical tap on the telephone line...

.

Software

Software-based recording solutions emerged shortly after sound boards were introduced for the personal computer in the late 1980s. Software-based recording applications on mobile telephones emerged shortly after the release of the first smartphone

Smartphone

A smartphone is a high-end mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform, with more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone. The first smartphones were devices that mainly combined the functions of a personal digital assistant and a mobile phone or camera...

s.

VoIP

Voice over IP

Voice over IP

Voice over Internet Protocol is a family of technologies, methodologies, communication protocols, and transmission techniques for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol networks, such as the Internet...

 (VoIP) telephony began emerging in the mid 1990s. In commercial environments VoIP was first used behind corporate PBXes in order to deploy telephones capable of delivering additional computing services. In the consumer environment VoIP was introduced to allow people to bypass telco long-distance charges, either allowing callers to communicate directly, or allowing them to connect to local telco bridges. Finally, telcos themselves very quickly deployed IP-based backbones in order to more efficiently carry their long-distance traffic.

The rapid growth of VoIP-based telephony has led to the introduction of a plethora of VoIP recording

VoIP recording

Voice over Internet Protocol recording is a subset of telephone recording or voice logging, first used by call centers and now being used by all types of businesses...

 solutions. All VoIP services allow or will soon allow calls to be recorded.

Telephony Technology Mashups

In recent years traditional and VoIP telephony have blended together in many combinations. Most people no longer know or care which technology they use to make a telephone call. They may use a soft VoIP phone on their computer, a traditional land line in their kitchen, and both a VoIP and a "traditional" dialer on their mobile telephone. The person at the other end of the call may be forwarding their land line to Skype, or their VoIP connection to their mobile.

Because we use so many different telephones, from so many different locations, device or location-based recording methods fall short. A lawyer needing to record conversations with clients, for example, needs to capture calls from her office telephone system, from her mobile, and from her home line. Traditionally, this required three recording systems, one PBX-based, one smartphone-based, and one PC-based. These recordings, of course, end up in three different places. Managing this complexity is difficult, expensive, and inefficient.

Cloud-based Services

In the late 1990s companies started selling software service directly over the Internet. This allowed clients to pay subscription instead of license fees, and also allowed them to forget about running the software altogether.

Although advantageous in many ways for the software vendors, they had to become experts in data center operations.

In late 2006 Amazon

Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

 introduced the first public cloud computing

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....

 service. It gave anyone with a credit card the ability to turn up computers on demand. Amazon managed the computers, the storage, and the bandwidth. Other vendors including Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

, Rackspace

Rackspace

Rackspace US, Inc. is an IT hosting company based in San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Australia, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Hong Kong, and data centers operating in Texas, Illinois, Virginia, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong in late 2008...

, and Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 soon followed.

It wasn't long before telephony services began migrating into the cloud.

Approaches

Cloud-based call recording services follow one of three models:

1. Calling Card
2. Device-based Redirect
3. Cloud Bridge

The earliest services used the calling card model, making use of telephony service wholesalers. A sophisticated device-based redirect solutions appeared in the UK in 2009 to address newly-introduced regulatory requirements. The first cloud-bridge service was introduced in the US in early 2011.

Vendors in this space are quickly moving towards hybrid approaches designed to meet the needs of various communities.

Calling Card Model

The calling card model requires a user to dial a number, input a code or key, and then dial the desired number.

In most cases, the telephony portion of the services is not itself hosted in the cloud, although the rest of the service may well be.

RecordAll is an example of a service built using this model.

Device Redirect Model

In 2008 the Financial Services Authority

Financial Services Authority

The Financial Services Authority is a quasi-judicial body responsible for the regulation of the financial services industry in the United Kingdom. Its board is appointed by the Treasury and the organisation is structured as a company limited by guarantee and owned by the UK government. Its main...

(FSA) in the UK published a policy directive requiring regulated financial services firms to record their employees mobile telephone calls. Due to industry push-back and implementation difficulties, the requirement was delayed until November 2011.

In order to meet this requirement, the mobile call recording industry explored solutions that could not be circumvented, so that all outbound and inbound calls are automatically recorded. This device redirect approach differs from more traditional device-based recording solution in that the recording is not made and stored on the handset but, rather, made and stored in a cloud-based recording system that is automatically conferenced-in with any call.

An example of a service built using this model is VoxSmart's VoxRecord service.

Cloud Bridge Model

Services built using the cloud bridge model place almost all of the functionality in the cloud. Calls are triggered from VoIP clients, smartphones, web browsers, and applications.

Some services, those supporting VoIP clients in particular, appear to make a direct connection to the destination telephone. Signaling the service to record the call takes place transparently.

Others services signal the service when placing a call, but do no call into it. Instead, the service calls both the source and destination numbers, bridges them, and records the call.

In all cases, the service is tightly integrated into a telephony infrastructure. Both reside in the cloud. This allows providers to store recordings in the cloud and make them available to subscribers through personal portals.

Google Voice and Call Trunk are good examples of the cloud bridge model. Google Voice requires that subscriber phone(s) be registered with the service, whereas Call Trunk allows any phone to be used at any time. Google Voice allows inbound call recording only; Call Trunk only allows outbound call recording.

Hybrids

As the industry matures we can expect to see the emergence of hybrids of these three models as vendors address the needs of both consumers and commercial verticals.

Service List

Service	Vendor	Model	Supported Source Handsets	Call/Recording Trigger
Call Trunk	Call Trunk Holdings Ltd.	Cloud Bridge	All	iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Web applications
CallRec.me	MotionApps	Cloud Bridge	Softfone	Softphone, Web applications
Google Voice	Google Inc.	Cloud Bridge	All Google Voice enabled	iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Web applications
Inline Mobile Recording	Compliant Phones Ltd.	Device Redirect	BlackBerry, Symbian	Automatic
RecordAll	RecordAll Overphone Enterprise Inc.	Calling Card	All	Dialin
RecordiaPro	Recordia, LLC	Calling Card	All	Dialin
SaveYourCall	Pixelware, LLC	Calling Card	All	Dialin
VoxRecord	VoxSmart Ltd.	Device Redirect	BlackBerry	Automatic