Call recording has come a long way in the last 25 years.
Back in 1988, call recording was still a process of reel-to-reel recordings, in most cases. Now we have automatic call recording that can be coupled with speech analytics, not just easing the recording of calls but also enabling the usefulness of recordings to increase.
It is hard to imagine that just a few decades ago, call recording was both hard to enable and even harder to use, requiring manual processing to use the recordings for any significant use.
These old reel-to-reel recordings also took up lots of space, meaning they had to be archived. This cut down on their usefulness.
The first digital call recorder debuted in 1993 by Philips (News - Alert). This innovation upped the quality of call recording, and made it easier to work with such recordings. But still it was relatively hard to record calls, and relatively challenging to use them. The 64-bit digital recorder then debuted in 1994.
The move to digital freed up recording somewhat, and made it easier to collect recordings. But it wasn’t until several years later that storage became cheap enough to effectively capture and keep all recordings, let alone make them accessible.
Two trends have rapidly set the pace of call recording innovation since then.
First, there’s the introduction of voice-over-IP, which has made call recording easier since voice now can be digital, not analogue. This makes call recording easier to initiate and manipulate, in that computers can now easily capture recordings, store them, and pipe them to other systems such as speech analytics.
The second big advancement has been the cloud, which has enabled hosted call recording. Hosted call recording makes storage and recording even easier, as there’s less need for on-premises equipment and recordings can be accessed from anywhere at any time.
But along with this accessibility, security has become more of a threat. It wasn’t until the past decade that solutions such as PCI (News - Alert) PSS recording solutions were introduced, solutions that help ensure the confidentiality of credit card data. Other similar solutions have emerged to identify and mask sensitive information, which becomes more of an issue as it becomes easier to record, store and search audio recordings.
The advancement of speech analytics also has been a game-changer. It enabled businesses to make better use of call recordings by automatically discovering key phrases or other data from within the recordings, greatly easing the process of putting recordings to good use.
A lot has changed in the past 25 years.
Edited by Alisen Downey