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GrandCentral Call Recording

GrandCentral is a phone service that last year was acquired by Google. GrandCentral's premise is pretty straight-forward. They allow you to have a telephone number in any city that you can have forward to your home phone, your office phone, or your cell phone(s) all at once.

We set up a number at ErieBlogs.com to allow people to leave us voice mail comments about topics. It didn't get a ton of use but GrandCentral did all the recording and all I had to do was download the mp3's.

Speaking of ErieBlogs.com, we recently solicited questions from our readers to ask Kathy Dahlkemper, who is running on the Democratic primary for the PA 3rd Congressional seat currently held by Phil English. We were finally able to schedule the interview, but it was during a time Kathy was heading to a fundraiser in Butler. I didn't want to try to transcribe that on the fly, so I started researching ways to record our conversation.

I didn't want to spend money on a device that records calls, so I searched for a web service that would record my call. I was surprised to find out that GrandCentral, something we were already using, and I use at home, would record calls.

I did a few tests before the interview and it worked flawlessly and the sound quality was very good. On Friday afternoon, I did the interview with Kathy as she drove down I-79 to Butler.

The interview was good, but towards the end her cell dropped the call and she had to call back. My immediate fear was that since I didn't stop the recording of the call, I'd lose the 20 minutes of audio that we'd just recorded. She called back, and I started another recording by pressing the 4 key. We finished and I hung up and immediately logged into GrandCentral. It was smart enough to finish the first recording so both my files were safe and sound. Today, I'll edit those into 1 file and post them on ErieBlogs.com.

GrandCentral is really cool. I don't know for sure if they're open to everyone yet, but I've got a few invites left if you'd like to try out the service.