For reference, the old issue #24 on Github and some previous posts also discuss this feature, though things moved on in favor of the audit and location tracking.
I believe the major change that would need to happen to implement this feature would be to record sound natively within Collect--rather than depending on an external app such as RecForge. This means this change could apply for the existing per-question recordings as well as the future background recording feature. Some thoughts on the implication:
- A user should be able to choose between the internal and external recording methods (since external apps will always have more bells and whistles)
- The advantage of recording natively is that users wouldn't depend on external apps (esp. the need to purchase RecForge Pro for > 3 min recordings) and their challenges (see e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4)
- Users would need to grant the permission to allow recording audio
- Users would be less likely to make mistakes trying to record audio through external apps
I suggest that this is a per-form setting to allow recording (audit) the entire form, not for specific sections (which quickly gets complicated when users move around the form, see this comment. It should be the survey administrator setting this so that enumerators don't have to activate it. For example:
| type | name | label | appearance |
|---|---|---|---|
| audit_audio | audit_audio | record=TRUE sampling=44khz | |
| .. | |||
| survey |
In Collect there could be a new setting to disable audio auditing (or to disable uploading audio files with the submission), even if a form requires it. This may be important if someone is collecting data in a remote area with particularly bad connectivity. For example:
