SaveYourCall.com Blog

Two years ago this month we launched SaveYourCall.com. Driven by our own needs to have hardware-free cost-effective call recording we set out to build a solution that we wished already exists. Our customers have shown us that we were not the only ones who have this need by sending us wondeful notes complementing our service on a regular basis.

It is thanks to our wonderful customers that we are able to provide this service. We are looking forward to serving you for many more years.

We were recently sent a link to the following interesting blog post:

10 Infamous Phone Calls from History

The fact that many of these calls were recorded is what makes them so infamous. Hearing a call recording is vastly different than just getting a summary which may or may not be reliable. Although your calls may not go down in history, using SaveYourCall can help ensure calls important to you are preserved with every detail.

When building SaveYourCall, we couldn't do everything from scratch and still be cost effective for our customers. So we put a lot of thought into utilizing what is already out there to ensure our time is focused on bringing these tools together into a easy to use service and providing great customer support.

Since Valentine's day is today we put together a list of all the services and software SaveYourCall is built on as a way of saying thank you to the tools we rely on. So without further ado:

Services

• Twilio - The heart of how we handle phone calls. Without this service it would just be too expensive to run SaveYourCall and still be profitable. Also using a service like this means that really smart engineers are monitoring the telephony part of our business day and night. It also means we can scale to as many calls as we need without a moments notice.
• Heroku - Hosts the SaveYourCall website. Their cloud hosting is second to none ensuring that our website is up and running providing a team of engineers day and night. They also allow us to scale on a moments notice to handle whatever call traffic our customers can throw at us. We also love that their platform is built on great open technology like Linux, Nginx, Varnish and PostgreSQL.
• New Relic - Their application monitoring ensures we can see problems in our service before our customers do.
• Progstr Logger - Their logger ensures that if an issue does arise we can easily go back in time and see exactly what was happening in our app.
• Sendgrid - Ensures that our customers receive our e-mails so a recording shared, or forgot password e-mail gets to the desired destination.
• Zerigo DNS - Ensures when you make a request to the SaveYourCall website that the no time is wasted figuring out where the server is.

Software

• Ruby on Rails - The framework our own code is built on. Our Rails application handles both our website and managing the flow of the call. Without Rails it would have been much more time consuming to build this service.
• A host of 3rd party Rails add-ons. These add-ons provide our application well tested code that we didn't have to implement. This means we can focus more on making our service easier and providing great support. These add-ons include: enforce_schema_rules, inline-style, Prototype, rack-rewriterubyzip, Nokogiri, ActiveMerchant, AWS::S3, rest-client, Delayed::Job, calendardateselect, will_paginate, authlogic, exception_notification, FlexMock, FixtureReplacement and ruby-debug
• Git - Manages all our source code. This ensures we can develop new features and continue to improve the site without risking the stability of the service you depend on.
• SQLite - Although we use PostgreSQL in production we use SQLite for testing and development.

To all the services and tools that we use, I want to say thank you and we love you. We are big believers in open source software as they make services like SaveYourCall possible. Our next post will discuss some of the open source software SaveYourCall has contributed to the community.

Customers often ask of if we offer the ability to transcribe a call automatically. Such a feature would be great for things for things like conference calls, interviews, etc. Unfortunately the technology is just not there yet. But there are great alternatives!

So why cannot we use voice recognition to automatically transcribe a call? Many voicemail services do this right? Well voicemail is different. Voicemail is just one person talking. This makes it easier to provide automatic transcription. And even then the resulting quality isn't stellar. But a conversation is harder. Things like overlapping dialog and different accents make it hard for the software to just recognize the words. But more importantly a good transcription will assign the words to the right people so you will know who said what. The result of attempting to automatically transcribe a call with multiple people is so low we could not justify charging for such a service.

But this doesn't mean your call is forever stuck in audio form. There are many companies out there that specialize in providing a transcription from an audio recordings. Since you can download and share recordings this makes it easy to get the call in the hands of these services. Traditional transcription services too expensive for you? Take a look at Casting Words. They utilize Amazon's Mechanical Turk to allow real humans to do the transcription but at a much lower cost than traditiional transcription services.

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NOTICE: You may not use SaveYourCall.com to violate the privacy rights of another person. Your location and who you are calling will determine what obligation YOU have to ensure privacy rights are being respected. SaveYourCall.com makes no attempt to notify the parties that the conversation is being recorded and it is SOLELY YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to ensure privacy obligations are met.

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