Hello World

Originally published on the Clarify.io blog. View archived copy.

Three years ago we started a company called Calltrunk, which allowed consumers and small businesses to record all of their calls, whether mobile, landline, or Skype. We stored all of these recordings in a centralized cloud-based repository that could be accessed from the web as well as any mobile device. What Dropbox does for files, we did for recorded calls.  Thousands of people signed up, and lots of people told us how useful — critical in some cases — the service was.

But we noticed an odd pattern. People accessed their recordings less and less as the recordings got older. When we asked why, the answer was always the same: it was too difficult to find things. We realized we needed a search engine on top of these recordings.

We looked for an off-the-shelf solution, didn’t find anything, and realized we were going to have to build one ourselves. Given the background of our engineers (software, telephony, voice, and search engines) we knew we could do it, but we didn’t realize just how much work it was going to be. Despite our collective knowledge, it took us nine months to release our first beta.

When we did, our users were amazed. For the first time they could search their phone calls the same way they searched their email. And we didn’t just tell them which calls matched their queries, we showed them where in each call their search terms were spoken. That way they didn’t have to re-listen to an hour-long conference call just to find the section they cared about.

Before long we were contacted by banks who also needed to search their calls, because it was the only way they could quickly respond to regulatory queries. And one day a company building a video library for students asked if they could use our search engine for videos.

After helping half a dozen companies embed our platform into their software, the light bulb went off and Clarify was born.

But before making the platform available to the world, we needed to simplify the API and build a better search engine. After another nine months of work, we launched this new self-service API into private beta on March 15th. Since then, hundreds of companies have asked for early access to the platform. We’re letting them in slowly but surely. We’re learning a lot, and we’re loving the feedback.

It took us 18 months to make people’s phone calls properly searchable on Calltrunk. Today, any developer can do the same with just two lines of code and a couple of hours of work.

We think that’s cool, and we’re excited to see what everyone else does with this technology.