Call recording with LiveKit Egress

Every production telephony deployment needs call recording. Regulators expect it, customers may demand it, and your own quality assurance team cannot function without it. This chapter shows you how to record calls with LiveKit Egress, store them in S3, and build the compliance controls that keep you out of trouble.

What you'll learn

• How LiveKit Egress captures call audio from a room
• How to configure RoomCompositeEgressRequest for telephony recording
• How to store recordings in S3 with organized key structures
• Compliance fundamentals: consent, retention policies, and access controls

How Egress recording works

LiveKit Egress is a separate service that subscribes to a room and captures its media. For telephony, you typically want a composite recording — a single audio file that captures all participants in the room mixed together. Egress runs as its own process, so it does not affect call quality or agent performance.

Configuring room composite egress

The RoomCompositeEgressRequest tells Egress what to capture and where to put it. For telephony, you want audio-only output in a format suitable for long-term storage.

from livekit.api import LiveKitAPI, RoomCompositeEgressRequest, EncodedFileOutput, S3Upload

async def start_recording(room_name: str, call_id: str):
  api = LiveKitAPI()

  output = EncodedFileOutput(
      file_type="OGG",
      filepath=f"recordings/{call_id}.ogg",
      s3=S3Upload(
          access_key="YOUR_AWS_ACCESS_KEY",
          secret="YOUR_AWS_SECRET_KEY",
          region="us-east-1",
          bucket="your-call-recordings",
      ),
  )

  request = RoomCompositeEgressRequest(
      room_name=room_name,
      file_outputs=[output],
      audio_only=True,
  )

  egress_info = await api.egress.start_room_composite_egress(request)
  return egress_info.egress_id

import { LiveKitAPI, RoomCompositeEgressRequest } from "@livekit/server-sdk";

async function startRecording(roomName: string, callId: string) {
const api = new LiveKitAPI();

const request: RoomCompositeEgressRequest = {
  roomName,
  audioOnly: true,
  fileOutputs: [
    {
      fileType: "OGG",
      filepath: `recordings/${callId}.ogg`,
      s3: {
        accessKey: "YOUR_AWS_ACCESS_KEY",
        secret: "YOUR_AWS_SECRET_KEY",
        region: "us-east-1",
        bucket: "your-call-recordings",
      },
    },
  ],
};

const egressInfo = await api.egress.startRoomCompositeEgress(request);
return egressInfo.egressId;
}

Compliance controls

Recording calls without proper controls is a liability. Three areas require your attention: consent, retention, and access.

Consent. Many jurisdictions require that all parties on a call are informed that recording is in progress. Some require explicit consent. Your AI agent should announce recording at the start of every call — "This call may be recorded for quality and training purposes" — before any substantive conversation begins. In two-party consent states or countries, you must obtain affirmative consent and log it.

Retention. Recordings should not live forever. Define a retention policy — 90 days, one year, seven years — based on your regulatory requirements. Use S3 lifecycle rules to automatically transition recordings to cheaper storage tiers and eventually delete them.

# Example: S3 lifecycle configuration for call recordings
lifecycle_rules = {
  "Rules": [
      {
          "ID": "TransitionToGlacier",
          "Filter": {"Prefix": "recordings/"},
          "Status": "Enabled",
          "Transitions": [
              {"Days": 90, "StorageClass": "GLACIER"},
          ],
      },
      {
          "ID": "DeleteOldRecordings",
          "Filter": {"Prefix": "recordings/"},
          "Status": "Enabled",
          "Expiration": {"Days": 365},
      },
  ]
}

Access control. Not everyone in your organization should be able to listen to call recordings. Use S3 bucket policies and IAM roles to restrict access to authorized personnel. Log every access event for audit trails.

What you learned

• LiveKit Egress records calls by subscribing to a room and capturing mixed audio.
• RoomCompositeEgressRequest with audio_only=True is the standard configuration for telephony recording.
• S3 provides durable storage with lifecycle rules for automatic retention management.
• Compliance requires consent announcements, defined retention policies, and strict access controls.

Next up

In the next chapter, you will build an outbound calling system that initiates calls for campaigns, reminders, and follow-ups.