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A big thanks to Jai Vikram at Desistartups for a comprehensive review of the Call Graph and our service CRIMS. Thank you so much guys. Do hop over and read the review.

Kamla Bhatt has an interview of Rajiv Poddar (that’s me ). Read it here.

Aashish of Pluggd.in shares the news of our service launch in his blog. Read more here.

And finally thanks to Brad about his tweet on Call Graph. You made our day.

So what after the recording. You are obviously recording the call with some purpose. Our web service, CRIMS which stands for Call Recording Indexing and Management, provides you with several options once you are done with the recording. I’ll briefly go over the things you can do with CRIMS in this article.

Registering:

You need to register for our web service to use it. Registration is free and straightforward. Provide your mail id to us and we’ll send you a link. Click on the link and we’ll ask you to fill out a form. And you are done.

Several of our users have reported that they are not getting the mails at all. It happens because a lot of mail clients (especially Hotmail) treats such mails as spam. Hence check your spam folder if you do not get the mail. You can always request for a new mail from the register page as well.

Setting up the Account:

This web service works with our Skype call recorder only. So before you can do anything with it, you need to associate and verify your client installation. If you haven’t already installed the client, then its the right time to do so. Get it from here.

On your computer, right click on the Call Graph task bar icon, choose ‘Configuration’, go to the ‘Association’ page and enter your username and password that you used to create your account. Click on the ‘Associate’ button. You should get a notification saying that your machine has been added and it needs to be approved before calls can be uploaded. The approval has to be done from the Machines page.

If you want all your calls records to be automatically uploaded to your account then make sure that ‘Automatically upload a copy to my account’ option on the associations page. The upload happens independently of call recording in the background. So you can carry on with your work and record more calls if you want.

Uploading:

Now that your account is set up, you can start uploading calls. Start a call with ‘echo123′ and record it. If you have opted to upload calls manually, open the Call Graph history dialog (right click on the CG Task bar icon and choose ‘History’) and click on the upload link below the file name. Otherwise the upload starts as soon as the call recording completes.

The client will notify you when the upload finishes. After that login to your account. You should see something like this.

Call Recording History:

This is your call record history page. This is the first page you are shown when you log in to your account and is the starting point if you want to do something with your record. There are two parts to this page: the left hand menu and the history table. The menu lists down the other pages that you can go to. We’ll get to that in a short while.

In the call record history there are two main parts: the details column and the management column. The details column displays the details of your call record. When was it recorded, by whom, when was it uploaded, was it shared with someone and so on.  It also has an embedded flash player. Click on the play button and you should be able to listen to your record.

The management column gives you a set of actions that you can do with your record. Few of them are self explanatory. You can rename the file, edit the tags or delete it in the same way you can do in the client. You can also download it back if you want. Helpful if you are recording calls from several machines.

Note that when you delete the file its completely removed for our system. There is no way to get it back. You can do a ‘reupload’ if you still have it in your client though.

As with the client, this page also displays your call records in reverse chronological order, the latest one first.

Sharing:

If you want to share it with someone, maybe the person you recorded the call with, click on the share link. It will ask you for the email id and instructions of how to access the record will be sent to your contact.

Once you share a record, a new field will start appearing your your details column stating with whom was the record shared with. There will be a new option in the management column as well to unshare the call record. If you mistakenly shared your record, click on unshare and all the shares will be revoked.

Note that the contact you have shared your call with can only play it back. Since you are the owner of this record, only you have can delete, share, transcribe etc.

Transcribe:

If you want a text transcript for your call then click on the transcribe link. We provide transcripts for calls which pass our quality checks. The parameters for quality check include voice quality, your language setting (must be American English for now) and duration (> 5 minutes).

Once the screening is passed you will be notified of it. You can click on the transcribe link and place an order for the transcript from there.

As we go along we will add support for many more languages and accents. This post has a some details of our transcription process if you are interested to know more.

Search:

One of the most interesting feature of our web service is Search. We can do contextual searches. When your call records are being screened we generate a list of keywords which can be used to identify your call record. These keywords added to the tag list of your call record. So now you can actually search for a call with a word which might have occurred during the call itself.

A search bar is present at the top of the history page. Type in your search term and press enter. It should take you to a the ‘Search Results’ page where all records matching your search terms will be listed.

As with the client, we also add the your contact’s name by default to the tag list. So if you want to list all the call records with a particular contact of yours, just search for it and it will display the timeline.

The search is also very basic currently since we lack good language and grammar databases. But as we keep on improving the system, it should start getting more and more useful.

What Else:

You can add more machines to your account if you want from the machines page. As many as you want!

You can also mail us directly from the support page if you want to ask us something.

You can also change your password, or your language setting or delete your account from the settings page. if you click on delete, we delete all the records and personal data you have provided us with. We retain nothing!

Note that if you do not want your call records to be screened then you can set your language setting to ‘Other’.

What’s Next:

As you would have noticed, the UI is very simple and basic. Very Web 1.0′ish. But we are working on a major upgrade to it and things will be much better soon. So keep tuned.

If you haven’t signed up already then please do it now. Click here. We are offering all these services for free in the beta phase. So give it a try and let us know what you think of it!

So how do record Skype calls? Here’s how you do it with Call Graph.

Installation:

The first thing that you have to do is to download and install Call Graph client. Get it from here. Its completely free and certified by CNET. So you can be assured that it will not install any spyware/adware/crapware on your PC. What’s more, its completely free.

Save the installer to a directory and double click to run it. The installation wizard will start off, agree to the license and then click on ‘Next’ till it finishes. If you want you can modify the options during the installation. Here’s a screenshot of the installer.

Configuration:

After installation Call Graph icons should turn up on your Start Menu. Run it from there. The first time it runs, it might ask you to choose a directory where the Call Records are stored. It tries to guess but if it cannot, it just prompts. Once that is done, the Call Graph icon will appear on your task bar. Hover your cursor over the icon and it will show you the status.

The first status it will show will be “Waiting for Skype connection…”. All Skype plugins have to be authorized by the user before they can connect to Skype. So Skype will display a dialog asking you to Authorize it. Once you click OK on that, its ready to record. Hover your cursor again and it should show “Connected to Skype. Ready to record…”. Here’s a screenhost of the Skype authorization dialog.

If you do not get the Skype dialog asking you to authorize then, you have to authorize the plugin manually. Go to the Skype ‘Tools’ menu, choose ‘Options’ and click on the last item ‘Advanced’ on the left hand navigation bar. Look for a link called “Manage other programs access to Skype”. Click on that and explictly give permission to Call Graph.

Recording:

At this stage you are all set to record. To check, right click on the Call Graph task bar icon and select ‘Start Recording’. You should get a notification saying that no calls are in progress. So go ahead and make a call. If you do not have anyone to call then call up echo123 (Skype’s test call service). As soon as the call is connected, you should get another recording saying that the call recording has started.

When the call ends, Call Graph will again notify you that the recording has been completed and the filename where it has been saved. Click on that link of the notification and you will be able to see your call record now. To play it back, just click on it. Your default mp3 player will be launched and you can listen to you recording.

Each of the calls that you record will end up on your search dialog. To open the dialog anytime, double click on the Call Graph task bar icon. At the bottom of each call you will see options to manage the call record. You can either rename it, edit the tags and delete the file.

Tagging and Search:

By default all your calls are tagged with the name of your contact. So the ‘Echo Skype Test Call’ should have been marked with echo, skype, test and call tags. You can can add as many tags as you want to it. And then search with your tags. Type ‘echo’ in the text box on the top of the search dialog and press enter. You should see the Skype Test call record as a result.

To list all the calls from a specific contact, just type in the name and you should see it listed in reverse chronological order. The tagging and search feature has been designed to help you locate a call record that was made some time back. It takes away the pain of managing individual files in a folder. If you want you can still open your call record folder and play the call record manually.

Options:

You can configure Call Graph to record call automatically or manually.  The setting is in configuration dialog, ‘Automatically record Skype calls’ check box. If this option is enabled then recording will be started automatically for all your calls. If not, then you’ll get a notification when a call is made or received. You can choose to start recording from that notification.

You can also set the ‘Auto Update’ feature on or off. We don’t recommend turning the feature off since we are still in beta phase and release updates at regular intervals. Usually once a week.

You can also change the recording parameters. We support mp3 and wav encoding formats. For mp3 recording we support various bit rates and sampling rates. The default setting is 80kbps bit rate at 16 kHz sampling rate. Its good enough to record voice calls.

What else?

Nothing. That’s it. It’s that simple to record Skype calls. Download, install and authorize. You dont have to pay anything or hack to record a Skype call anymore. Try it out now. If you face any issues, we are always eager to help out. Get in touch with us here.