California call recording law

You cannot record an incoming call in California on your own consent alone. The caller has to be told, and the telling has to happen before anything worth recording is said.

In practice this means a spoken notice in the first sentence — not a line in a privacy policy the caller has never read, and not a beep. Several all-party statutes, Washington’s most plainly, treat a recorded announcement at the start of the call as the consent mechanism.

The interstate problem is the real one. A firm in California takes calls from outside California, and courts have applied the stricter state’s rule in that situation. Announcing the recording on every call removes the question rather than answering it.

ClerkBird opens every call with the same sentence, before it asks anything: “Thanks for calling [firm]. I’m an AI assistant, and this call is recorded. How can I help you today?”

That line is enforced in code. It is not a setting, and a firm cannot edit it out — which is the point: a disclosure that any customer can disable is not a compliance control. It also covers the second obligation, bot disclosure, which California and other states impose independently of recording law.

Firms that would rather not hold audio at all can set retention to zero, and ClerkBird keeps only the transcript.