Record – and Search (!) – Your Calls with Calltrunk

Ever need to remember what you said on a phone call? Calltrunk promises to let you record – and search – your phone calls easily. Does it work?

Even in the world of text and email, I still make a lot of voice calls. Maybe I’m a bit old school, but I personally love the immediacy and sheer personal-ness of phone calls. However… I have a terrible memory, and unlike email, text, or IM, my memory of phone conversations isn’t recorded and definitely isn’t searchable. Especially for someone like me that typically puts everything into Evernote where I can search for information when I need it, voice calls seem almost anachronistic.

I’ve certainly used a number of call-recording services in the past, and while they do a fine job of storing calls as MP3s, they haven’t really solved the problem of being able to search. Rather, if I want to bring up an important detail from a call with a client, I have to listen to the entire recording to find the key item I’m looking for. This is time consuming and decidedly not fun.

Calltrunk is a web-based service that promises to solve this particular problem. Calltrunk lets you initiate calls from the web, from Skype, or from your smartphone, then it records your calls (both phone and/or Skype) and stores them online. You can export your calls to Evernote, Dropbox, or Box for safekeeping, or just leave them in Calltrunk’s Trunk.

But here’s the interesting part – Calltrunk indexes your calls and makes them searchable. You can actually search for a word, and Calltrunk’s ARGOsearch feature brings up the conversations with that word in it. It actually shows you on a timeline where in the conversation that word appears, so you can go directly to that part of the conversation. In this example, I searched for the word “plan” and Calltrunk showed me the three places in the conversation where it appeared.

Calltrunk
Calltrunk's voice search results.

Since I work with many clients virtually via Skype, Calltrunk has come in handy when I’ve needed to recall a specific recommendation to a client, or if I wanted to take further notes on a strategy that we’ve discussed. I can also send my client the recording of our call, and tell them to listen to it at a specific point to refresh their memory of what we spoke about. Without Calltrunk, I’d have had to listen to the entire call over again just to find the one or two specific moments that I was looking for. I found the search worked very well overall.

Besides the searchability, I’ve found that Calltrunk’s recording quality is really good, and I also like that it integrates with Skype without using additional software (you simply add the Calltrunk robot to your call to record it).

While I love that you can export your Calltrunk recordings directly to Evernote, the ability to search your calls exists only within the Calltrunk web app. Once you export your call to another destination, it’s simply an MP3 recording. You can always go back to Calltrunk to perform a search, but it would be better if the search tool were integrated into the destination.

In my business, I primarily use Calltrunk for recording client calls, but I could see that if you’re in any sort of business where you make phone calls regularly and want to capture them, that Calltrunk could be very useful.

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