Recording Phonecalls

Apparently, customer service is shoddy or nonexistent nowadays. When I make calls to straighten out a bill or other problem, I try to keep notes about when I called, to whom I talked, and what we talked about.



It would be even handier if I could have an automatic library of recorded phone calls. And the automaticness of the library creation could be even easier on a mobile phone than on a regular land line, since “mobile phone” is just shorthand for “tiny computer that has many features, one of which is to let you talk to other people with it.”



Here’s how my ideal setup would work:



- when you make a call on your mobile phone that you want to record, you press some button on the phone to activate recording. This can happen as you’re starting the call or during the call



- the phone records by streaming the digitized audio of the call to a (web) server set up somewhere running some software to accept the digitized audio



- the outgoing stream from the phone is timestamped and annotated with the phone number (and other info, if available) of the other end of the call



- the phone automatically handles any legal or regulatory requirements (on a state-by-state or country-by-country basis) such as announcing that the call is being recorded or generating a periodic beep.



- the server that stores the streamed recordings lets you browse, sort, and annotate them. That way, on a future phone call with whatever soulless corporation refuses to refund the $2.96 they owe you, you can easily make reference to previous calls



- the server that stores the streamed recordings (and your phone) also work together to let you play back previous calls (or sections of previous calls) into a new call. So when the rep from the aforementioned soulless corp. says that surely there was no way that Charlie told you on your last call that you are not allowed to speak to a supervisor because it is their policy that anyone can talk to a supervisor whenever they want, you can play back the bit about Charlie telling you to stuff it.



Does this exist already for any mobile phones? If not, can it be built? If not, why not?

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