Private call transcription is coming to every Zen customer, with your calls turned into text on our own infrastructure instead of being sent to a third-party AI provider. If you've held back from transcription because of where your customers' personal data would end up, that reason is about to go away.
It arrives with 3CX Version 20 Update 10, which is now at release candidate stage (the last round of testing before a final release). We'll be able to switch it on for you as soon as the final release is out.
Why so many businesses have held back from transcription
3CX has offered AI call transcription for a while, but the built-in options send your call recordings to an outside provider such as OpenAI or Grok to be processed. For many of our customers in healthcare, finance and legal, that's been the end of the conversation. They can't send customers' personal information to a third-party processor, so they've gone without.
Running transcription privately used to mean buying a dedicated server for your own phone system and setting it up yourself, which wasn't cheap or simple. Update 10 changes how the 3CX AI Server works. One of our AI servers can now serve many customers' phone systems, and we can run several for redundancy, so we can offer private transcription as a service instead of asking you to buy hardware.
Your calls are processed on our own private, locked-down infrastructure, connected to your phone system over a secure link. Recordings and transcripts are archived to our own storage. Nothing is sent to a third-party AI provider.
What changes when your calls become searchable text
Plenty of businesses already record their calls, and we've always made sure callers hear that calls are recorded for quality and training purposes. But a recording is only useful if someone listens to it, and most businesses don't have anyone with time to sit through every call.
Once calls are text you can search, sales teams can check exactly what a customer agreed to, or what a salesperson promised. Managers can see how well customer service staff are looking after callers. And you can compare sales calls against your sales script to see who delivers it well and who could use some training.
3CX also writes a summary of each call and gives it a sentiment score, a rating of how the caller seemed to feel. Update 10 lets you customise how those summaries are written.
Example
If you have a team of 30 taking calls all week, you could pull a report of every call that scored below 3, read the summaries, and only open the full transcript for the few that need a closer look. The information was always sitting in your recordings. Now you can get to it far faster.
What you need and what it costs
Transcription needs a 3CX AI Edition licence of at least 8 simultaneous calls (8SC). 3CX licenses by how many calls can happen at the same time, not by user.
Licence
Our customers are already on Pro licences, and for the smallest businesses, moving from a 4SC Pro licence to an 8SC AI licence is around £20 a month extra at most.
Private transcription
From £25 a month for small businesses, with a fair use policy. The price is based on how many minutes of calls you expect to transcribe.
Doing this yourself would mean opening your own OpenAI or Grok account, or building your own AI server, and keeping on top of the billing that comes with it. With us, we point your phone system at our AI servers and that's it. There's no separate AI account for you to look after.
Our view on who it's for
We don't think there's a catch. If your business has phone conversations with customers that matter, transcription is worth having. Most of us are used to a note taker or a transcript on video calls now, and phone calls deserve the same.
For us, the biggest benefit is being able to concentrate on the conversation. When you know the call is being transcribed, you can think properly about the problem in front of you instead of trying to write everything down. Afterwards, the transcript and summary are there to work from.
The only businesses we'd tell not to bother are those that rarely make calls, or whose calls don't matter much. We don't think there are many of them.
Talking to us about private transcription
If you'd like to know what private transcription would look like for your business, book a free consultation and we'll talk it through with you.