Again, thank you Neil and Pieter for your replies. As some of you know, I am, among other things, a lawyer by training. So allow me to go briefly over the legal implications brought up by VoiceTracker (VT). This is not going be a thorough study in comparative law, so let us focus on the case in the US.
Let’s assume a conversation between two persons gets recorded. Then there are three cases:
1.Mutual consent: both parties are aware that the conversation is being taped (possibly by one of the parties) and have no objections. No legal problems here.
2.One-party consent: one of the parties knows they are being taped and has no objection. This situation is legal in 38 of the 50 states in the US.*
3.Third-party consent: someone is taping a conversation between two parties without their consent. Illegal, except for the authorities in certain situations.
The second case is the most relevant for VT. Note that it can always be turned into the first case by asking for someone’s permission - although I’ll be the first to admit that might be a bit awkward. The most obvious strategy would be to implement it in those states where you need only one-party consent. For calls to other states, you can choose the option of including a notification that you’re using VT, or just shut the app down.
@Neil - In business settings it is often standard procedure to tape phone calls. Therefore, because it happens so often, it’s not very awkward to inform people you are too.
OK, enough about the legal stuff, I hope everybody is convinced that it does not have to be a major obstacle. More on implementation!
@Pieter - I totally agree that the added value isn’t in just storing the conversation. A LOT of companies are already doing that. But the thing is, those companies are actually very much focussed on the b2b market, whereas VT is more geared towards personal use. Also, they really look like they’re having a 20th century approach towards the whole thing: E0.19 per stored conversation which they email to you, and that’s about it :p Let’s examine how we could do better.
To reiterate some of the points I discussed in my previous post:
- Tagging the conversations with geo-spatial data, data on your conversation partner(s), or your own/automatic tags (business, social, etc.)
- Search on date/time, tags, keywords, etc.
- Analysis of the conversations
- Transcription
I think the first one speaks for itself. The second and the third are enabled mostly by the fourth, the transcription part. From what I see on the web, voice recognition software is already very accurate (+98% under ideal circumstances: http://voicerecognition.com/). Like Pieter said, it’ll be an extra difficulty to keep this stuff functioning at that high level when there’s lots of noise. But who said that it has to be perfect right from the start? Or ever, for that matter? I’m guessing the software gets better at recognizing your words, the more you use it. And in any case, you also have the original recording.
Guys, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: of course there will be resistance against this. But I think it’s just a temporary thing, people adjusting to the possibilities of new media. Look at all the people not ‘getting’ Twitter: they still think in terms of the old.
As a final note, I’d like to say it’s probably a good thing that many entrepreneurs are deterred by this resistance, because it implies less competition 
P.S. For the sake of the clarity of EntreList, I’ll post a big item like this on my own site next time: http://ptegelaar.nl (NB No activity there yet).
*My personal opinion is that legislation is lagging behind the technology in those 12 states. Saving voice conversations and saving IM conversations are not fundamentally different, so it doesn’t make much sense to make one illegal and not the other.
