Twilio Call Recording Controls is Now Generally Available

• API level control for start, stop, pause, resume recording actions
• Ensure compliance with privacy regulations
• Available now for all customers

Recording your customer conversations provides valuable information for understanding customer sentiment, agent training, dispute resolution, and more. However, there are parts of some conversations that you don’t want to or may be legally required not to record - a customer’s home address or credit card number, for instance, or if your customer does not consent to you recording the call or parts of the call.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Call Recording Controls, which give you the flexibility to determine which parts of your conversations are recorded. With Call Recording Controls, you can start, stop, pause, and resume recordings using a simple API.  For example, you can record immediately after receiving an inbound call (including any IVR interactions), start a call recording only after the customer provides consent to record, or pause an active recording when an agent is collecting payment information.  Simply Business, the UK's biggest business insurance provider, has begun testing Call Recording Controls within their new US Contact Center.  Peter Vandenberk, Principal Engineer, Simply Business says: "Embedding a Call Recording Controls feature was an operational must for us to comply with data privacy requirements. The ability to pause and resume only required one line of code and we've received great feedback from the team using it around the ease of use and its stability."

Personally Identifiable Information (PII) Collection

Your agents need to collect PII, but it could be a liability to have that information stored in a recording if it isn’t necessary. With Call Recording Controls, you can have the best of both worlds - a full-length recording to use for post-call analysis, and a gap in that recording during the exchange of PII or any other sensitive information. With two simple API calls, your application or the agent will pause the recording while you collect the PII, then resume the recording immediately afterward.

In order to perform the pause and resume actions, you need the Recording SID of the active recording. To receive this, you can subscribe to a recordingStatusCallback which will provide the Recording SID immediately when a recording begins. 

With the Recording SID in hand, you can pause an active recording:

When you’re ready, a second API request resumes the recording:

The final recording will be returned as a single file, with silence during the paused period.  (Note that the API also supports operating on the 'current' recording, without requiring a Recording SID.  Reference the API docs for more details).  

Customer Consent Prior to Recording

There are scenarios where you don’t want to start recording immediately when the call starts. In many cases, you have to obtain customer consent before recording. Call Recording Controls makes it easy to start a recording at any time during the call so you can be sure that your recording practices are compliant with the law.

Here’s an example API request that starts a recording in the middle of an active call, with parameters to subscribe to RecordingStatusCallbacks and to configure a dual channel recording.  

Pricing

There is no additional charge for Call Recording Control features beyond the current recording platform pricing of $.0025/min. Paused recordings continue to record silence to preserve recording continuity, and are billed for the full duration of the recording. 

Getting Started

Call Recording Controls is available for all customers.  Check out the Recording API docs or Support Guide to get started.   We can’t wait to see what you build!