How To Transcribe Five9 Recordings Automatically

Your Five9 contact center can generate large volumes of call recordings—conversations packed with customer insights, compliance-related details, and coaching opportunities. But here’s the catch: VCC audio recordings sit in a retention window of up to 30 days and may be removed sooner after successful offload via SFTP or FTP, depending on your contract. Without an external workflow to retain and transcribe recordings, valuable call data can be hard to analyze at scale. The good news? You can export Five9 recordings and send them to automated transcription platforms that convert audio into searchable text.

Key Takeaways

Five9 offers AI Summaries in AI-enabled bundles, with GenAI Suite call transcript and summary retention configurable for up to 60 days
Export-based transcription workflows can provide more control over retention and downstream integrations
Five9 says its AI Summaries capability can save up to 40% of an agent’s time by reducing manual note-taking and summarization
Custom dictionaries can improve recognition of specialized terminology, although results still depend on audio quality and the terms involved
SOC 2 Type II certification, strong encryption, and appropriate access controls are important considerations when handling sensitive customer conversations
Five9 provisions recording ports equal to roughly 20% of agent seats by default; additional recording capacity can be requested
Sonix supports transcription in 54+ languages
Browser-based transcription editors with word-level timestamps can accelerate quality assurance and review workflows

Why Automated Transcription is Essential for Five9 Users

Contact centers running on Five9 face a fundamental challenge: call recordings contain valuable information, but extracting insights from raw audio manually is slow. Reviewing calls one by one can create bottlenecks across compliance, training, and quality assurance workflows.

The business case for automatic transcription comes down to three realities:

Compliance and recordkeeping: Organizations in regulated industries may be subject to call-recording, retention, privacy, or recordkeeping requirements depending on their jurisdiction and use case. Searchable transcripts can make relevant conversations easier to review, but organizations should determine their own legal and regulatory requirements.
Training efficiency: Supervisors can’t realistically listen to every call. Searchable transcripts make it easier to find specific interactions and coaching examples.
Customer intelligence: Call data can reveal patterns around product issues, service gaps, and recurring customer questions when organizations can analyze conversations at scale.

Five9’s native AI Summaries address some of these needs by combining call transcription with generative-AI summaries. Five9’s retention policy says GenAI Suite call transcripts and summaries can be retained for up to 60 days, depending on configuration. Five9 also supports prompt customization through GenAI Studio and dictionaries that can bias transcription toward frequently used terminology.

Organizations that need additional retention options or want to process recordings in external transcription and analysis systems can export Five9 recordings and route them to dedicated transcription software.

Choosing the Best Transcription Software for Five9 Calls

Not all transcription services handle contact center audio equally well. When evaluating options for Five9 recordings, focus on these criteria:

Accuracy on real-world audio: Call center recordings can include background noise, accents, overlapping speech, and industry jargon. Look for transcription services that support vocabulary customization and make uncertain words easy to identify and review. Custom dictionaries can help with company names, product names, technical terms, and other specialized vocabulary, but they do not guarantee perfect transcription.

Security and compliance: Your call recordings may contain sensitive customer data. When evaluating a transcription service, look for protections such as:

SOC 2 Type II certification
Encryption in transit and at rest
Role-based or granular access controls
Clear data-retention and deletion controls

Integration capabilities: The right transcription solution should fit into your existing workflow. Consider whether it provides an API, webhooks, automation integrations, and export formats that can connect transcripts to your CRM, BI, quality-management, or archival systems.

Scalability and cost predictability: Contact centers process variable call volumes, so review storage, usage allowances, API availability, transcription limits, and pricing before designing a high-volume workflow.

Sonix’s automated transcription platform provides automated transcription, Custom Dictionaries, a browser-based editor, API access, team features, and SOC 2 Type II-certified security controls.

Seamlessly Transcribe Your Five9 Audio to Text

One way to automate transcription of Five9 recordings is to export the recording files to an SFTP destination and then use an integration layer to submit those files to your transcription platform.

Step 1: Configure Five9 Recording Export

In Five9’s administrator settings, configure recording export under the Export > Recordings area. Five9 supports FTP and SFTP for recording transfers and recommends SFTP when the transfer path is not otherwise protected.

When configuring the destination, you can:

Enter the hostname for your destination server
Configure SFTP authentication, including an optional private-key file
Build recording filename patterns using variables such as session_id, agent_name, campaign_name, and skill_name
Verify your destination and configuration before relying on it for production recordings

Five9 stores individual recorded calls as WAV files. Its documentation also notes that recording capacity is determined by the number of recording ports provisioned to the account.

Step 2: Connect the SFTP Destination to Sonix

Five9 and Sonix do not provide a documented native SFTP-to-Sonix connector that automatically watches an arbitrary Five9 SFTP folder.

For a fully automated workflow, use middleware, an integration service, or a custom script to retrieve recordings from your SFTP destination and submit them to Sonix.

The Sonix REST API allows paying subscribers to submit a media file or provide a file URL for transcription. Sonix can also send a callback when transcription finishes, while webhook functionality is available for eligible Enterprise accounts.

A typical custom workflow can look like this:

Five9 transfers the WAV recording to your configured SFTP destination
Your integration detects or retrieves the new recording
The integration submits the recording to Sonix through the API
Sonix processes the recording and generates the transcript
Your application receives a completion callback or checks transcription status
The finished transcript is reviewed, exported, or passed to another system

This additional integration step is important: simply configuring Five9 SFTP export does not cause Sonix to monitor that server automatically.

Step 3: Deliver Transcripts to Your Systems

Sonix supports several transcript and subtitle formats suitable for downstream workflows:

DOCX/TXT/PDF: For document management and archival
SRT/VTT: For captions and subtitle workflows
JSON: For structured integrations through the Sonix API

With Sonix, you can convert audio to text in 54+ languages. Common document and subtitle formats can be exported from the browser-based editor, while structured JSON transcript data is available programmatically through the API.

Enhance Call Analysis with AI-Powered Transcription Tools

Raw transcripts are just the starting point. Modern AI analysis tools can help teams identify themes and information across large collections of conversations.

Automatic theme and topic extraction: Sonix can identify recurring themes and topics across transcripts, helping teams find repeated product questions, customer concerns, or other patterns without reading every transcript individually.
Sentiment analysis: Sonix provides sentiment analysis that can help teams examine emotional tone and identify changes in sentiment throughout a conversation.
Key entity identification: Entity detection can extract and tag people, organizations, locations, dates, and other entities mentioned in transcripts, improving search and structured analysis.
Summary generation: AI-generated summaries can turn long calls into more digestible overviews of key points, decisions, and action items.

Five9 also offers AI Summaries for its own call workflows. Five9 says the feature can save up to 40% of an agent’s time by reducing manual note-taking and call-summary work.

Improve Productivity with Advanced Transcription Features

Beyond basic speech-to-text conversion, advanced editor features can make it faster to review and refine call transcripts:

Speaker identification: Sonix can detect speaker changes and separate dialogue into speaker segments. For ordinary single-track recordings, users may still need to assign speaker names. Multitrack uploads can automatically apply the names assigned to individual tracks, and Sonix’s Voiceprint feature can recognize previously saved speakers in future recordings.
Word-level timestamps: Click any word to jump to that exact moment in the audio. Supervisors reviewing a transcript can move directly to relevant sections instead of manually scrubbing through the entire recording.
Confidence highlighting: Sonix’s transcript heatmap highlights words for which the system has lower confidence. Reviewers can use these indicators to focus proofreading on sections more likely to need verification.
Find and replace: Correct recurring words or phrases throughout the current transcript with Find & Replace and Replace All.
Custom dictionaries: Add company names, technical terms, product names, and other specialized vocabulary to a Custom Dictionary to help the transcription engine recognize them. Custom Dictionaries can improve results for specialized terminology but do not guarantee perfect transcription, and numbers or acronyms may still require manual correction.

Sonix’s browser-based editor includes these capabilities alongside synchronized audio playback so you can transcribe audio and refine the transcript within the same workflow.

Ensuring Security and Compliance for Your Five9 Call Data

Call recordings may contain sensitive information such as account details, personally identifiable information, or health-related information. Any transcription workflow should account for security and privacy throughout the data lifecycle.

Encryption requirements: Look for encryption both in transit and at rest. Sonix documents TLS encryption for data transfers and AES-256 encryption for stored data.
Access control: Granular permissions help ensure that only appropriate users can view, edit, share, export, or delete transcripts. Enterprise SSO/SAML can provide centralized identity management.
Compliance certifications: Sonix is SOC 2 Type II certified. Healthcare organizations can use Medical Sonix, which provides HIPAA-oriented safeguards and Business Associate Agreements.
Data retention controls: Organizations should understand how long transcripts and recordings are retained and how they can be deleted when they are no longer required.

Five9’s data-retention policy states that VCC audio recordings are retained until the sooner of 30 days, successful offload by SFTP/FTP, or the period specified in the applicable contract. Exporting recordings to another system can provide more control over downstream retention, but the destination’s own storage limits, policies, and regulatory requirements still apply.

Sonix provides enterprise-grade security, including SOC 2 Type II certification, AES-256 encryption at rest, TLS encryption in transit, access controls, and user-controlled deletion. HIPAA-compliant workflows and BAAs are available through Medical Sonix.

Collaboration and Workflow Management for Five9 Transcripts

Transcripts often need input from multiple stakeholders: QA specialists reviewing interactions, trainers identifying coaching opportunities, and analysts extracting customer insights. Collaboration features can reduce the friction of emailing files and consolidating separate feedback.

Shared workspaces and folders: Organize transcripts into team folders by project, department, campaign, or another structure that fits your workflow.
Comments and notes: Add paragraph-level notes directly to transcripts so reviewers can leave feedback in context.
Permission controls: Sonix supports read-only and edit access as well as permissions at account, folder, and file levels. Teams can limit access to sensitive material without exposing an entire transcript library.
Integration with other recording sources: Sonix also supports integrations with services such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Dropbox, and Google Drive, making it possible to organize different types of recorded conversations within one transcription environment.

Sonix’s collaboration features provide team folders, notes, sharing controls, and granular permissions for organizations reviewing large collections of transcripts.

Exporting and Integrating Five9 Transcripts with Your Existing Systems

Transcripts become more useful when they can move into the broader systems your organization already uses. Look for flexible export and API options that fit the way your team handles conversation data.

CRM workflows: Use transcript exports or API integrations to associate conversation information with customer records when your CRM and internal architecture support it.
Business intelligence tools: Structured transcript data can be incorporated into analytics pipelines that compare conversation themes with operational metrics.
Quality management workflows: Transcripts can provide searchable source material for teams evaluating customer interactions and agent performance.
Document management systems: Export transcripts into document repositories when longer-term archival or document-based review is required.

Sonix supports browser exports including DOCX, TXT, PDF, SRT, and VTT. Its REST API can also return transcripts in structured JSON form, making it possible to build custom workflows into CRM, analytics, or other internal systems.

Leveraging AI for Global Reach: Translating Five9 Call Transcripts

Contact centers serving international markets may receive calls in multiple languages. Transcription makes those conversations searchable, while translation can make them accessible to teams working in another language.

Multi-language transcription: Sonix supports transcription in 54+ languages and also supports files containing multiple selected languages.
Automated translation: Translate completed transcripts for teams that need to review conversations in another language.
Translated subtitles: Translated transcripts can also support multilingual subtitle workflows for training or other recorded-video use cases.

Sonix supports automated translation into 55+ languages, allowing teams to combine transcription and translation within the same platform.

The Smart Choice for Five9 Transcriptions

Five9 provides contact center recording, transcription, and AI capabilities of its own. For organizations that also want an external transcription workspace, Sonix can provide another layer for transcription, editing, analysis, collaboration, and integration.

Custom vocabulary support: Custom Dictionaries can help Sonix recognize product names, company terminology, technical terms, and other specialized vocabulary. Results still depend on recording quality and the type of information being spoken, so important details should be reviewed.
Security controls: Sonix is SOC 2 Type II certified and uses AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS encryption in transit. Granular permissions, two-factor authentication, and enterprise SSO provide additional access controls.
AI-powered insights: Sonix AI Analysis supports summaries, themes, sentiment analysis, topic detection, entity extraction, custom prompts, and folder-level analysis.
Team collaboration: Team folders, notes, version history, read-only/edit access, and granular permissions support collaborative transcript review.
Flexible integration: Browser-based exports and a REST API make it possible to move transcript data into document systems, analytics workflows, and custom applications without requiring teams to replace their existing technology stack.

For organizations looking to retain and analyze Five9 call recordings outside the contact center platform, Sonix’s enterprise features provide transcription, analysis, collaboration, security, and API capabilities that can be incorporated into a custom Five9 recording workflow.

Make your Five9 recordings easier to search, review, and analyze with Sonix automated transcription.

Frequently Asked Questions

How accurate is automated transcription for Five9 call recordings?

Automated transcription accuracy varies with recording quality, speaker clarity, accents, background noise, overlapping speech, terminology, and other audio conditions. Custom Dictionaries can help Sonix recognize company names, technical terms, and other specialized vocabulary, but they do not guarantee perfect accuracy, and details such as numbers and acronyms may still need manual review.

Can I integrate Five9 recordings directly with transcription software?

Five9 can export call recordings to an external server using SFTP, but an automated Five9-to-Sonix workflow requires an additional integration step. A script, middleware service, or other automation can retrieve new recordings from the SFTP destination and submit them to the Sonix REST API. Sonix can then provide a callback or, for eligible Enterprise accounts, webhook notifications when processing is complete.

What are the security measures for transcribing sensitive customer conversations?

When evaluating a transcription provider, look for strong encryption, independent security audits, appropriate access controls, and clear retention and deletion policies. Sonix is SOC 2 Type II certified, encrypts stored data with AES-256, uses TLS for data in transit, and supports granular permissions. Healthcare organizations that need HIPAA-oriented safeguards and a Business Associate Agreement can use Medical Sonix.

How can I use transcribed Five9 calls to improve customer service?

Searchable transcripts allow teams to review much larger collections of conversations than they could practically listen to manually. AI analysis can help identify recurring themes, customer concerns, sentiment patterns, and other trends, while supervisors can use searchable, timestamped transcripts to locate examples for coaching and quality review.

Is it possible to identify different speakers in Five9 call transcripts?

Yes. Sonix can detect speaker changes and separate dialogue into speaker segments. With single-track recordings, users may still need to assign or correct speaker names. Multitrack recordings can be labeled by track during upload, and Sonix’s Voiceprint feature can automatically recognize previously saved speakers in future recordings.

Get accurate transcription in minutes

Start transcribing smarter. Try Sonix free or explore our pricing to find the right plan for you.

Try Sonix Free See Pricing