Recording calls helps with training, quality, and keeping an accurate record. It also comes with legal responsibilities around consent. ReliaRing handles both: you choose how calls are recorded, and the system can announce recording and manage how long recordings are kept.
Consent is the law
Recording laws vary by location:
- One-party consent — only one person on the call needs to know it is being recorded (often the person recording).
- All-party (two-party) consent — everyone on the call must be told and agree. Many US states and other regions require this.
When callers cross regions, the stricter rule usually applies. When in doubt, announce recording on every call.
Set your recording rules
Go to Settings and open the Recording tab. You can set:
- Consent mode — choose One-Party, All-Party, or Geographic. The mode sets the wording of the notice your callers hear. All-Party gives the strongest wording ("This call is being recorded. If you do not consent, please hang up now.") on every call. Geographic decides per call: if either number is in a place that requires everyone to agree — California, Washington and several other US states, or countries such as Germany and France — that call gets the strong wording automatically, and the notice plays even if you switched it off for that direction.
- Announcements — play a spoken "this call may be recorded" message on inbound calls, outbound calls, or both. These two switches are what decide whether a caller hears anything.
- Announcement language — the language the notice is played in.
Tip: Even where the law only needs one-party consent, announcing recording builds trust and avoids disputes.
The tab also shows a periodic beep option and a caller opt-out key. Neither is connected to the call yet — no beep plays, and a caller pressing the key has no effect. See Recording Announcements: What Your Callers Hear.
Find and play recordings
- Click Call Recordings in the left menu (or go to /portal/recordings).
- Browse or search your recordings.
- Click one to play it, download it, or delete it. You can filter by whether a recording has a transcription.
Retention: how long recordings are kept
Retention is set on the Call Recordings → Retention page, not on the Recording settings tab. You can choose to keep recordings forever, for a set number of days, or up to a storage limit with the oldest deleted first, and preview what a rule would delete before saving it. If you set nothing, recordings are deleted 90 days after they are stored.
A legal hold stops recordings being deleted while a matter is open. The account-wide hold is under Account Settings → Compliance; holding one specific recording is available to administrators through the API but has no button in the portal yet.
Choose a retention period that matches your industry's rules — long enough to satisfy compliance, but not longer than you need. Full detail: Retention and Legal Hold.
Handling sensitive information (PCI)
If you take card payments over the phone, do not record those calls. Recording cannot currently be paused and resumed mid-call, so there is no way to keep card details out of a recording while the rest of the call is captured. Recording is switched on for the whole account, so if your team reads card numbers aloud, handle those payments on a channel that is not recorded.
Privacy rights (PIPEDA, GDPR and similar)
Your recording settings include options to support data subject access (providing a copy of a recording on request) and deletion (removing recordings on request). Both are on by default. Requests are raised and processed by an administrator through the API — there is no portal screen for them yet. See Privacy Requests for Recordings.
What to expect
- Recordings are stored in Canadian cloud storage and encrypted at rest, and every link to them is short-lived and signed. See How Your Calls and Messages Are Protected.
- Everyone who can open the Call Recordings page sees every recording in your account, not only their own calls. Recordings are not filtered per user, so control this by controlling who has portal access.
Related
- Call Recording: What It Does and What It Does Not Do — the full picture, including the limits worth knowing before you switch it on.
- To pull recordings out in bulk for an audit or migration, see Exporting Call Records, Recordings, and Reports.