It depends on your state. Federal law lets a call be recorded when one person on it agrees, and that person can be your own business. Some states want every person on the call to agree, so the safe habit is to say it out loud in the first few seconds and keep those words inside the recording.

The federal rule is the floor

Title 18 of the United States Code, section 2511(2)(d), says it is not unlawful for a person not acting under color of law “to intercept a wire, oral, or electronic communication where such person is a party to the communication or where one of the parties to the communication has given prior consent to such interception” unless the recording is made to commit a crime or a wrong against someone. That text sits on the U.S. Code site run by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives. That page carries no update date. The line at the top of it names the day you are reading it, not the day the words last changed.

Read the sentence again. One party. You are a party to your own calls, and that is the case those words were written for.

That is the floor, not the ceiling. States write their own recording laws on top of it, and the two below ask for a lot more than one person nodding.

This is not legal advice or tax advice. It is a reading of the statutes, not a lawyer looking at your business. Before you switch recording on, ask an attorney licensed in your state and check what your own state attorney general publishes.

California wants everyone on the call

California Penal Code 632(a) makes it a crime to act “intentionally and without the consent of all parties to a confidential communication” and use a recording device to record it. A first violation is punished by “a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500) per violation,” or jail, or both. If the person has already been convicted under that section or one of the sections next to it, the fine runs to “ten thousand dollars ($10,000) per violation.” That is on California Legislative Information, the state legislature’s own site, and the credit line under the section reads “(Amended by Stats. 2016, Ch. 855, Sec. 1. (AB 1671) Effective January 1, 2017.)”

The $2,500 is a number you can go check in about a minute. Pull up Penal Code 632 on leginfo.legislature.ca.gov and read subsection (a) for yourself.

Then read 632.7 on the same site. It covers a call carried between two cell phones, a cell phone and a landline, or a cordless phone and either of those. It also asks for “the consent of all of the parties,” and it prints the same “two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500)” for a first violation. Its credit line shows an amendment effective January 1, 2023. That section matters more than it looks. The homeowner calling a plumber at 11 at night is almost always on a cell phone.

Washington makes it unlawful to record a private communication sent by telephone “without first obtaining the consent of all the participants in the communication” in RCW 9.73.030(1)(a). Then subsection (3) tells you exactly how to get it. Consent “shall be considered obtained whenever one party has announced to all other parties engaged in the communication or conversation, in any reasonably effective manner, that such communication or conversation is about to be recorded or transmitted: PROVIDED, That if the conversation is to be recorded that said announcement shall also be recorded.”

That text is on the Washington State Legislature site, and the history line under the section shows 2021 as its most recent change.

Two useful things are buried in that sentence. The announcement is the consent. And the announcement has to live inside the recording itself. A line in your call software saying the greeting played is not the same as the audio file holding the words.

That is the habit worth building whatever state you work in. Say it, then keep the saying of it in the file.

The robot question is not the recording question

There is a second worry sitting next to this one. Do you have to tell people a computer is talking? That is a different question with different law behind it, and for the chat box on your site it has its own write-up in does website chat have to say it is a bot. What that chat box does with the words people type is a third question again, covered in is a chat widget on your site a privacy problem.

One thing is worth knowing before a vendor tells you otherwise. The California wording about an artificial voice on the phone sits in Public Utilities Code 2874, and that section opens “Whenever telephone calls are placed through the use of an automatic dialing-announcing device, the device may be operated only after an unrecorded, natural voice announcement has been made to the person called by the person calling.” Placed. Calls your business makes. If your AI only answers calls that customers make to you, ask anyone selling you a disclosure feature for your inbound line to read you that first sentence out loud.

What to say in the first five seconds

Short, and first, before the caller starts describing the leak.

  • Name the business.
  • Say a computer is answering.
  • Say the call is recorded.
  • Then ask what is wrong.

Said out loud, that is about one breath. “You have reached Miller Plumbing. A computer is answering, and this call is recorded. What is going on?”

Then handle the plumbing behind it.

  • Record the greeting as part of the call audio, not as a separate log entry.
  • Play it on every call, including callbacks and calls that roll over from your cell.
  • Know how long recordings are kept and who can play them back.
  • If you take calls from more than one state, write the greeting for the strictest state you serve, not the state you sit in.

Here is the part nobody selling this will say. You may not need to record at all. If the only reason for the recording is that the software wants a transcript, ask whether a written summary would do the same job: name, number, address, and what is broken. No audio kept is one less pile of other people’s voices to guard. Do not buy call recording you have no use for.

What to do next

  1. Look up your own state recording law by name, on your state legislature’s own site. The statute, not a blog post about the statute.
  2. Write the greeting in four short sentences and read it aloud. If it drags, cut words.
  3. Have an attorney in your state read the greeting before it goes live, and ask them which states you serve want everyone on the call to agree.
  4. Call your own number at two in the morning from a cell phone, then play the recording back and check the greeting is inside it. There is a fuller list in how to test your AI agent before you turn it on.
  5. Write down where the recordings live and how long you keep them. Put the next review date in your calendar.

One last thing worth knowing. If the after-hours helper is the AI assistant that answers on your website rather than the number people tap on the page, that is typed text and not a phone call, so the two recording sections above are not the first ones to read. The phone line is its own job, with its own law, and it earns its own five seconds of honesty at the front.

Written by Galloping