Call Recording and AI Disclosure

1. We say it is an AI

The assistant identifies itself as a virtual assistant for your business. It is instructed never to claim to be a human being, and if a caller asks whether they are speaking to a person it says that it is not.

This is not a limitation we tolerate. It is the position we take. A business that says openly that its front desk is an AI reads as confident and modern. One that is caught pretending otherwise loses the customer and the argument at the same time.

2. Why this matters legally

• California’s bot-disclosure law (B&P Code § 17940 et seq.) makes it unlawful to use a bot to communicate with a person in California in order to incentivise a sale or transaction without disclosing that it is a bot.
• The EU AI Act’s transparency obligations require that a person interacting with an AI system is informed of that fact, unless it is obvious from the circumstances.
• Several other jurisdictions have introduced or are introducing comparable rules. Disclosing by default is the only approach that works in all of them at once.

3. Call recording and consent

Where your business uses the phone channel, calls may be recorded and transcribed so the AI can understand the caller and so you can review what was said.

Consent law for recording varies, and the variation is not academic:

• One-party consent jurisdictions (most US states, and federal law under 18 U.S.C. § 2511) require only that one participant consents.
• All-party consent jurisdictions require every participant to consent. These include California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington, and vary in detail.
• The UK and EEA require a lawful basis under UK GDPR / GDPR and, in practice, a clear notice at the start of the call.

Because of that variation, the Service is configured to announce recording at the start of the call by default, wherever your business is. It is the only setting that is safe everywhere, and it costs a caller three seconds.

4. What your business is responsible for

As the business the caller is trying to reach, you are the controller of the call. You must:

• Keep the recording announcement enabled unless you have taken your own legal advice for every jurisdiction you receive calls from.
• Not configure the assistant to deny being an AI, or to adopt a persona intended to make a caller believe they are speaking to a named human employee.
• Honour a caller’s request not to be recorded. The assistant will pass such a request to you, and you should take that call yourself.
• Make your own privacy notice available to your customers, covering the fact that calls to your business may be recorded.

Turning the announcement off is possible where your own legal advice supports it. Doing so is your decision and your risk, and we log the change.

5. What a caller can ask for

• To be told whether they are speaking to a person. The answer will be honest.
• To speak to a human being. The assistant will escalate rather than argue.
• A copy of the recording and transcript of their call, or its deletion. Requests go to the business they called; we will help that business fulfil them (see the Data Processing Addendum).
• To stop being contacted. A customer who replies STOP on any messaging channel is opted out immediately and automatically.

6. How long recordings are kept

Recordings and transcripts are retained for as long as your account is active and you need them, and are deleted on the schedule in section 7 of the Data Processing Addendum when your account ends. You can ask us to delete an individual call at any time.

7. Where the AI does not decide anything on its own

The assistant does not set prices, grant refunds, make exceptions or give regulated advice. Prices, availability and policies come from your own records, not from the AI’s judgement, and anything requiring authority is escalated to you.

8. Questions

Use our contact page. If you are a caller rather than a RingPost customer, contact the business you called. They hold the recording and we process it on their instructions.