Florida is a two-party-consent state. Here's what your phone line actually needs to say.

If you record a phone call in Florida and the other person didn't agree to it, you've probably committed a felony. That sounds dramatic and it is, but it's also literally what Florida Statute 934.03 — the Security of Communications Act, FIPA for short — says. Penalty: up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine per offense, plus the listener can sue you civilly for the greater of actual damages or $1,000.

I bring this up because most small businesses I talk to in Florida have no idea this is the law. They're recording calls for “quality and training” the way every chain customer service line does, and assuming that's fine because Capital One does it. Capital One does it correctly. A surprising number of small businesses don't.

What “two-party consent” actually means

Florida is one of about a dozen U.S. states that requires all parties on a phone call to agree to the recording before it starts (or, in practice, before any substantive content is discussed). The other big two-party-consent states are California, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington. The rest of the country is “one-party” — only one person on the call (usually the recording party) needs to know.

That single rule has three real-world consequences:

1. You can't use a national call-recording service that defaults to one-party-consent disclosure (which is most of them) unless you customize the script for FL.
2. The disclosure has to come before any substantive conversation. “By the way, I've been recording this whole call” at the end is not consent.
3. Implicit consent counts — if you say “this call is recorded” and the caller continues talking, that's legally valid agreement. You don't need them to say “yes, I agree.”

The shortest compliant disclosure we know of

Eight words: “This call is recorded for quality and training.” That's the line every AI FrontDesk assistant opens with — before the business name, before any questions, before any pleasantries. Eight words, then a beat, then the actual greeting.

We did it that way for two reasons. One, our voice AI is recording the call (we keep recordings 90 days for QA and retention; transcripts 24 months then anonymized). Two, even if we weren't, the same disclosure handles the FTC's Operation AI Comply requirement that AI systems disclose themselves to consumers, since the very next sentence is “Hi, this is the AI receptionist for <your business>.”

What you should do if you're recording calls today

First, check that whatever's recording — voicemail, Google Voice, a Twilio integration, a CRM call-logging plugin — actually plays the disclosure before the caller starts speaking. Most don't, by default. Most use a generic one-party script.

Second, if you have an answering machine that records callers leaving messages, that's usually fine in FL because the caller is the one initiating the recording when they choose to speak after the beep. The grey area is when you record a live two-way conversation without the disclosure.

Third, get the recording-notice page onto your website. We ship one at aifrontdesk.org/recording-notice for our own line; yours can live anywhere your business website does and just describe what you record, why, and how long you keep it. That's also a GDPR/CCPA-compliant privacy disclosure for the same recordings, two birds, one stone.

What we don't do

We don't give legal advice. Talk to a Florida small-business attorney before relying on this for your operation — the statutory exceptions and case law have nuance that this post doesn't cover (e.g. when the call is in a public space, when one party is law enforcement, etc.). What we can say is that compliance for an AI receptionist is genuinely cheap and easy: eight words, every greeting, every call. We just had to build it that way from day one.

Sources: Florida Statute § 934.03; Florida Department of State. We're not lawyers and this isn't legal advice.