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Audio Redaction Software
Find what needs removing by reading, not listening. Search the transcript, and the selection becomes an audio segment with the timing already correct. Replace it with silence or a beep, across thousands of recordings at a time.
Why Teams Move
7k-10k/day
Call recordings redacted for one county
82
Transcription languages, each with a published error rate
33+
Categories of spoken PII detected
What Makes Audio Hard
You cannot skim a recording
No thumbnail, no preview, no way to see where the sensitive part is. A card number is four seconds inside an eighty-minute call, and the only way to find it by listening is to listen to all of it.
Two people share one track
On a recorded call the customer reads out a card number and the agent repeats it back. You need the customer's side gone and the agent's side intact. That means the software has to work out who is speaking, not just what was said, and redact one voice while leaving the other in place.
The recording stays useful
PCI says the number goes. QA and training say the call must still be worth listening to. Muting the whole segment satisfies one and destroys the other.
Calls are not all in English
A multilingual contact centre cannot route half its archive to a specialist translator before redacting it.
Formats nobody planned for
Recordings arrive from whatever telephony or interview system produced them, including systems no longer in service. 315 extensions are handled without a conversion step.
Metadata survives redaction
Audio files carry device identifiers, timestamps and author fields. Metadata is stripped or rewritten on export.
What You Can Redact
Names
Callers, agents, third parties named in the conversation
Contact details
Phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses
Government identifiers
Social security, national insurance and equivalent numbers
Financial identifiers
Card numbers, CVV codes, account and routing details
Medical identifiers
Record numbers, health plan and provider references
Dates and ages
Dates of birth and other identifying dates
Usernames and credentials
Account names and reference codes read aloud
Country-specific formats
US, UK, Spain, Italy, Poland, India, Australia, Singapore
Any keyword or phrase
Anything you search the transcript for
Language Coverage, Stated Per Capability
Most vendors quote one number here. There isn't one.
Transcription
82 languages, each with a published word error rate
Document translation
80 languages
Audio and video translation
11 languages
PII detection
10 languages
The figure that matters for redaction is the PII detection one. Outside those ten the transcript still supports keyword and pattern search, which is how multilingual archives are handled in practice.
How It Works
Transcribe
Speech is transcribed and aligned to the timeline, so every word is a jump point. Language mode is specific, auto-detect, or auto-detect multi-language.
Separate the speakers
Each voice is labelled, so the agent's side can stay intact while the customer's is redacted.
Find
Search the transcript for the words, or let PII detection find them.
Replace
The segment becomes silence or a beep tone. Segments can also be set by start and end time directly.
Proof
Volume
7,000-10,000 a day, roughly 2M a year, queued bulk audio redaction
Jurisdiction
Deployed in the county's own private cloud
Legal basis
CCPA and CPRA, no PII leaving county possession
Outcome
Analytics programme proceeded, originals retained
Orange County, serving 3.2 million residents through a Social Services Agency that reaches one in three of them daily, wanted to analyse its call recordings to understand service quality. The recordings carried names, phone numbers and Social Security numbers, and state law meant they could not be shared with an analytics provider outside the county.
That set two requirements most tools fail. The volume made any per-file, operator-driven workflow arithmetically impossible. And the processing itself had to happen inside the county's boundary, because a cloud redaction service moves content out in order to process it.
Detection quality was the county's biggest concern, measured against hand-built ground truth at an average of 99.8%. Where the software could run was the precondition that decided which vendors could be considered at all.
Compared With Doing It by Hand
| Listening and muting | Redactor |
|---|---|
| Play the whole recording to find four seconds | Search the transcript, jump straight to it |
| Mute the segment and lose both voices | Redact one speaker, keep the other intact |
| One recording at a time | Queued batches worked overnight |
| A second pass to find what you missed | PII detection across 33+ categories |
| No record of what was removed | Exemption code on every redaction |
At Volume
Bulk redaction runs across a set of files rather than one at a time, queued and worked unattended. Bulk is permissioned per format, so an operator authorised for bulk audio is not thereby authorised for bulk video.
Where It Runs
Shared SaaS, dedicated cloud, your own private cloud, on-premises, hybrid, or fully air-gapped with the entire AI stack local.
FAQ
Audio Redaction Software questions, answered
How do you find the sensitive part without listening to the whole recording?
The recording is transcribed and aligned to the timeline, so you search the transcript for the words. The selection becomes an audio segment with the start and end times already correct.
Can you redact one speaker and not the other?
Yes. Speakers are separated and labelled, so on a recorded call the customer's card number can be removed while the agent's side stays intact and the call remains useful for quality review.
What replaces the redacted audio?
Either silence or a beep tone, chosen per job. Segments can also be set by start and end time directly rather than from the transcript.
How many languages does it cover?
Transcription covers 82 languages, each with a published word error rate. Automatic PII detection covers 10. Outside those ten the transcript still supports keyword and pattern search, which is how multilingual archives are handled in practice.
Can it process a whole archive rather than one file at a time?
Yes. Bulk audio redaction is queue-based and runs unattended, so a batch submitted at the end of the day is worked overnight. Volume has been exercised at over 1.1 million recordings.
Does the redacted file still carry identifying metadata?
No. Embedded metadata is removed or rewritten on export, so device identifiers and timestamps do not survive a release that redacted the content.
Send Us an Hour of Audio
Preferably a difficult one — accents, crosstalk, background noise, two people talking over each other.