The first question almost everyone asks before recording a real conversation isn't about audio quality or storage. It's quieter than that: am I allowed to do this? It's a good instinct. The rules are real, they vary by where you're standing, and most recording apps say nothing about them at all — they hand you a microphone and leave the law entirely to you.
Around the fire, you always knew who was listening. The circle was visible. Recording moved the circle out of sight, and the law is mostly an attempt to put it back. Here's how it actually works, in plain language.
One-party, two-party, all-party.
In the United States, recording-consent law splits into two families.
One-party consent is the federal default and the law in most states: as long as you are part of the conversation, you can record it without telling anyone else. You're a party; your consent counts; that's enough. You don't need permission from the other people in the conversation.
Two-party consent — more accurately all-party consent — means everyone in the conversation has to be informed and agree before you record. “Two-party” is the common name even when there are five people in the room; the point is that one person's consent (yours) isn't enough. The states that work this way include California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington, with Connecticut and Oregon applying all-party rules under specific conditions. Lists like this shift as courts interpret and legislatures amend, so treat any list — including this one — as a starting point, not the final word.
Two things make this trickier than the two buckets suggest. First, the law that applies usually follows the location of the people, and when a call crosses state lines, more than one state's rules can be in play at once — the cautious move on an interstate call is to follow the strictest state involved. Second, “informed and agree” doesn't require a signed form. In most two-party states, a clear verbal heads-up and the other person continuing to talk is treated as consent. Telling people is the work. It's not as heavy as it sounds.
The part most apps get wrong.
Most recording apps treat consent as your problem and theirs to ignore. They'll happily record in a two-party state and never once surface that there's a rule, let alone help you follow it. That's a quiet way of handing every bit of legal exposure to the user while keeping the product's hands clean.
There's also a louder failure mode worth naming: the meeting-bot approach of blasting an automated “this meeting is being recorded” announcement to everyone the moment a bot joins. It technically informs people, but it does it in the least human way imaginable — a robot interrupting to read a disclaimer. It satisfies a checkbox and corrodes the room.
The respectful version sits between say nothing and let a bot announce it. A person asks, plainly, in their own voice: “I'd like to record this so I can go back over it later — is that alright?” That's the whole thing. It's how you'd handle it at a dinner table, and it's exactly the interaction the law is reaching for.
How Bonfiyah handles it.
Consent is a built-in feature, in every tier — not a Pro upsell and not an afterthought.
The consent module does three things. It surfaces the relevant rule based on your location, as one line of plain-language guidance in the recording flow — so you know which family of law you're in before you hit record, without a law degree. It captures verbal consent when you want it: an optional prompt plays your chosen script, records the other person's “yes,” timestamps it, and attaches it to the recording. And it keeps an exportable log of those consent moments, so if you ever need to show that you asked and they agreed, the record exists and it's yours.
One line in the brand we hold to firmly: this surfaces the rule; it is not legal advice, and it never tells you a recording is “legal.” It tells you what the law in your location generally requires and gives you the tools to meet it respectfully. The judgment call stays yours, and for anything high-stakes — the kind of work we describe on the medical and clinical use-case page — a real lawyer beats any app.
Why we built it in, not on top.
We're a company that records conversations for a living, operating out of a two-party state ourselves. We don't get to treat consent as someone else's job. Building it into the recording flow — in every tier, on by default as a surfaced rule — is the only posture that's honest about what this product does. A recorder that helps you record but won't help you do it right isn't finished.
It also happens to be the better product. The fifteen seconds it takes to ask buys you something a silent recording never can: a relationship that survives the recording being discovered later. People are fine being recorded when they're asked. They are not fine finding out afterward that they weren't.
The consent layer also fits the rest of how Bonfiyah works. Real-time transcription runs on-device; audio leaves your iPhone only for the optional cloud-transcription pass you control. Speaker memory means the same person is recognized across recordings, so a “yes” you captured once stays attached to the right voice. The point throughout is the same: the people in the room should never be surprised by what the recording knows.
Record the real conversations, the right way.
Bonfiyah is free to start, and the consent tooling is there from the first recording — on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with your library kept in sync across all three. Glance at the rule for where you are, decide whether to turn on the verbal prompt, and capture the conversations that matter without leaving the legal layer to chance.
The circle was always visible. Bonfiyah just makes sure it stays that way.
— Richard
