My mom has severe dementia , though she can still answer the phone and call people with a speed dial button. I have a IVR on incoming calls that allows calls from people in the address book to go though uninterrupted, but other unrecognized calls hear a message “if this is not a spam call press 5”. This has cut down on the confusing calls from sales and scammers considerably.
Once in a while - like yesterday - she said her doctor (or someone of consequence) called and told her something important. I doubt some of these calls are real (the doctor doesn’t have her phone number on file anymore - they call me).
In any case, can I program voip.ms to record only the calls that are filtered through the IVR (press 5)? I don’t want to hear my 85 year old mom’s conversations with her 82 year old boyfriend, but if there are other calls I would like to make sure we’re getting important information or that she is not being scammed.
Thanks for your help in brainstorming how to do this.
Currently, the call recording feature only allows you to enable/disable both incoming and outgoing calls. Therefore, you would need to manually filter the calls afterwards, as we do not currently have an option to manage this separately. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Any chance that whatever phone/device she uses supports multiple lines? If so, you could record calls that come through one subaccount but not the other.
Excellent idea. Maybe I can filter incoming calls on the “approved” list to one sub account and all others to another sub account. I’ll have to experiment a bit with this. I appreciate the idea!
Yeah, I think the filtering part should be the easy part, the filter reads from the phonebook which is handy. Annoying it intercepts everything that matches, but in this case it would probably work as a whitelist to bypass the IVR.
It would be much better if it were implemented as a destination with conditionals like Time Conditions. But alas. Anyway…
If the end device only does a single account, I can imagine a complex Rube Goldberg set of steps that might work. I’m not sure if I can imagine it being a good idea though, even if it does work.
Here’s what I am thinking:
Start off with a Caller ID filter to intercept “wanted” calls and put them directly to her subaccount, without recording. Great.
Route the DID to the IVR like you do today, and have it put the calls to a SIP URI, which is a virtual DID with the recording flag turned on, itself configured to route the call to her subaccount.
It might work. It might not.
The biggest hurdle would be whether a SIP URI destination can be a local virtual DID, it is quite possible something will block local/loopback attempts to avoid real loops. If this is blocked, you might be able to figure out a way to toss the call to another POP and back, but at this point even Rube Goldberg himself would be questioning whether this is a good idea.
Too bad VoIP.ms doesn’t have a destination “recording” that would just set recording and transcription flags, then put the call to the next destination. I could imagine a few places I’d use that.
Also, the virtual DID has a cost, and the forwarding steps might all add a bit of per-minute cost too. That might not matter if the recorded calls are pretty limited anyway, but it’s worth considering upfront as the costs start to spiral.
I actually have a voip desk phone in her apartment so I can easily program a second sub account on this phone. She would not realize or understand if the call is coming in on a second sub account.
This is the perfect solution. Thanks for your brainstorming!