Call recording & AI disclosure

Last updated: 2026-08-07 · Version 0.1 · Status: Draft for legal review — not yet in force

This page is for the person who telephoned a business and found themselves talking to a machine. It explains what answered the call, what was recorded, where it went, and how to stop it. It is also the page a business should read before switching the assistant on, because in Canada what the caller is told — and when they are told it — is the business's responsibility, not ours.

The short version. The voice you heard is software, not a person. Depending on the business's settings, the call may have been recorded, and it was transcribed and summarised automatically. You can ask that business for a copy of what was kept, or ask them to delete it.

1. You were talking to software

The assistant answers in a synthetic voice and decides what to say using an automated language model. It is not a person, it is not supervised in real time, and it can be wrong. Nothing it says is professional advice — medical, legal, financial or otherwise — and it cannot make binding commitments on behalf of the business you called.

If you would rather speak to a human, say so. You can also hang up and contact the business another way; there is no obligation to continue.

2. What is recorded, and what is kept either way

Two separate things happen, and they are worth separating because a business can switch one off and still be doing the other:

Audio recording is a per-business setting. Some businesses record calls; some do not. When recording is on, the audio is held by the telephony provider that carried the call.
A written transcript is produced for essentially every call, because that is how the assistant understands you and how the business gets its summary. A business that has turned recording off is still keeping a written record of what was said. If you were told "this call is not recorded", that statement is about the audio and not about the transcript.

Alongside the transcript, the system stores the phone number you called from, the time and length of the call, an automatically generated summary, a sentiment assessment, and any follow-up actions the model extracted — for example a name, a callback number, or the reason you rang.

3. Consent — what the business must do

Under Canadian federal privacy law (PIPEDA), an organisation must obtain meaningful consent before collecting personal information, and recording a telephone conversation collects it. The long-standing guidance from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner is that a caller must be told at the start of the call, before any recording begins: that the call may be recorded, why, and that they may object and be offered an alternative.

Review note — remove before publishing. Provincial law adds to this and is NOT yet reflected here. Quebec's Law 25 imposes additional obligations, and Alberta and British Columbia have their own private-sector privacy acts. Criminal Code s.184 also governs the interception of private communications, where one-party consent is the operative rule. Canadian privacy counsel must confirm the wording of the greeting and this section before either is relied on.

In practice this means the greeting a business configures is doing legal work. We provide the field; the business writes it and is responsible for it. A greeting that does not disclose recording, on a business that has recording switched on, is a compliance problem for that business — and one we cannot detect on their behalf.

Review note — remove before publishing. Consider making a compliant recording disclosure the DEFAULT greeting for any tenant with recording enabled, and refusing to enable recording until the greeting mentions it. Today nothing in the software checks this, so this page describes an obligation the product does not enforce.

4. Who else sees what you said

To answer you and to write the summary, the transcript is sent to third-party providers who process it on our instructions. They are listed, with what each one receives, on the sub-processor list. In outline: the telephony carrier handles the call audio, and a language-model provider receives the transcript in order to generate the reply and the summary.

Staff at the business you called can read the transcript and the summary in their dashboard, and it is emailed to the addresses they have configured.

5. How long it is kept

Call records, transcripts and analyses are deleted automatically after 6 months. That is enforced by a scheduled job in the software rather than by a promise. The data retention and deletion page describes what that job removes, and — importantly — what it does not.

6. Your rights, and who to ask

The business you telephoned decides what is collected and why. It is therefore the organisation to contact if you want a copy of what was kept about you, want it corrected, or want it deleted. We hold that information on their behalf and act on their instructions.

If you cannot reach them, or you believe the information is being mishandled by us rather than by them, contact us at info@moneliautomation.com and we will route it to the business and to [PRIVACY OFFICER NAME]. You may also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

7. The chat assistant is a different thing

Some businesses also use a chat assistant that their own staff type into. It is not part of a phone call and does not listen to one. If a member of staff uploads a document to it, the text of that document is processed the same way as a transcript. That is covered by the privacy policy.

This is not legal advice. This document was drafted from what the software actually does, by the people who built it, and it has not been reviewed by a lawyer. It must be reviewed by Canadian privacy counsel — and, where a customer is a health information custodian or a law firm, by counsel familiar with PHIPA, the Alberta Health Information Act, Quebec's Law 25 and professional obligations of confidentiality — before it is published or relied on by anyone. Highlighted [LIKE THIS] are facts we have deliberately not invented; they must be filled in before publication.