Voice logging

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 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 and recorded to digital tape. With modern VoIP 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 developed by Magnasync in 1950. In 1953, Magnasync Corporation sold 300 voice loggers to the U.S. Air Force. Later systems were designed and manufactured by ASC, Comverse, Cybertech, Dictaphone, Eventide, Eyretel, Mercom, NICE, Racal, Verint, and Witness. Over the years, there has been substantial consolidation in the field and current major vendors include ASC, NICE, Red Box, Verint.