London-based Calltrunk has launched a phone call search engine that will allow users to search recorded calls for keywords and other important information.
ARGOsearch will be able to search communications made via landlines, smartphone and Skype, with Calltrunk claiming that it will “change the way people think about the spoken word.”
“Until now anything even close to this has been the expensive domain of very big companies and it has involved lots of hardware, data centres, complexity and training,” commented Paul Murphy, co-founder and CEO of Calltrunk.
“ARGOsearch changes that completely. This improves and democratizes the technology. Enabling everyone to capture, store and search their recorded calls means we can all hold on to knowledge and important moments that previously slipped through our fingers. And this changes the way we think about our conversations; it’s like having an infallible memory for everything we ever heard or said!”
A beta release of ARGOsearch will be launching immediately in the US, UK and Australia and for the time being will be included in the basic Calltrunk service.
Such a service will inevitably raise privacy and security concerns, especially since not all participants may be aware they are being recorded. Users of Skype are likely to be alarmed that their communications could now be monitored, especially when Skype itself operates on a P2P basis and doesn’t store any of its customers’ communications data.
ARGOsearch could be considered an invasion of privacy at a time when the government is considering forcing ISPs and landline and mobile operators to keep records of calls, texts, emails and visited websites, but not the content of these communications, under new anti-terror laws.
However ARGOsearch is perfectly legal, unlike the Android app sold in China which secretly records mobile phone calls, and if the software struggles as much as Siri to detect strong accents, some users may have nothing to worry about.
Do you know everything about smartphones? Find out with our quiz!
After the United States imposes 100 percent tariffs on certain Chinese goods, Europe widens its…
OpenAI strikes deal with Reddit to train its AI tech on user posts and give…
Global spending spree from Microsoft continues, with huge investment for new data centre to drive…
Workforce blow. Newly privatised Toshiba has embarked on a 'revitalisation plan' that will entail the…
European Commission opens an official child safety investigation into Facebook and Instagram-owner Meta Platforms
Hundreds of AI and cloud engineers are being offered relocation out of China by Microsoft,…
View Comments
Steve -
You're absolutely right to wonder how well ARGOsearch deals with strong accents. This is a very difficult problem, as Apple Siri will attest!
At present ARGOsearch is optimized for an American accent, but we are working very hard to develop a pan-English capability so that any English accent will be recognized with equal accuracy. This work will happen continuously in the background, so our users will notice more and more of their conversations being recognized. Eventually we will automatically re-index old conversations to take advantage of improvements in the software.
Having said all that, ARGOsearch is already very, very useful, even for non-Americans, so I encourage English speakers to try it for themselves! Speakers of other languages will have to wait a little bit longer...
Paul Murphy
Founder and CEO
Calltrunk