What is the vCon MCP Server?
Have you ever wanted to ask an AI assistant about past conversations? Maybe you want to find all the times a customer called about billing issues, or analyze patterns in support calls, or track what happened in a sales meeting. The vCon MCP Server makes this possible.
This post explains what the vCon MCP Server is, what problem it solves, and why it might be useful for you.
The Problem with Conversation Data
Most businesses have conversations happening everywhere. Phone calls, video meetings, chat messages, emails. These conversations contain valuable information, but they are usually scattered across different systems. Each system stores data in its own format. This makes it hard to:
Search across different types of conversations
Analyze patterns over time
Share conversation data between tools
Work with AI assistants on conversation history
Maintain privacy and compliance standards
You might have customer support calls in one system, sales meetings in another, and email threads in yet another. To get a complete picture, you would need to check all three systems separately. That takes time and effort.
What is vCon?
vCon stands for Virtual Conversation. It is an IETF standard format for representing conversations. Think of it like PDF for conversations. Just as PDF is a standard format that works across different computers and programs, vCon is a standard format that works across different systems.
A vCon file can contain:
The actual conversation content, whether it came from voice, video, text, or email
Information about who participated in the conversation
Analysis results from AI, like transcripts, sentiment scores, or summaries
Attachments like documents or images related to the conversation
Privacy markers that track consent and can hide sensitive information
The key benefit is portability. If you store conversations in vCon format, you can move them between systems without losing data. You are not locked into one vendor's system. You own your conversation data in a standard format.
What is MCP?
MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It is a way for AI assistants to use external tools and data sources. Without MCP, AI assistants can only work with the information they learned during training. They cannot access your live data or perform actions in your systems.
With MCP, an AI assistant can:
Read data from your databases
Perform actions using your tools
Access real-time information
Maintain context about what you are working on
Think of MCP like giving an AI assistant access to your toolbox. The assistant can see what tools are available, understand what each tool does, and use them when you ask. This makes AI assistants much more useful for real work.
What is the vCon MCP Server?
The vCon MCP Server combines these two ideas. It is a server that lets AI assistants work with conversation data stored in vCon format. You connect the server to an AI assistant like Claude, and then the assistant can:
Create new conversation records
Search through historical conversations
Analyze conversations for insights
Organize conversations with tags
Answer questions about your conversation data
The server speaks the MCP protocol, which AI assistants understand. When you ask the assistant to do something with conversation data, it uses the server's tools to get the job done.
What Can It Do?
Here are the main capabilities:
Store conversations - The server can store conversations in vCon format, following the IETF standard exactly.
Search conversations - You can search in four different ways:
Basic filtering by subject, participants, or dates
Keyword search that looks for exact words
Semantic search that finds conversations by meaning, even if the exact words are different
Hybrid search that combines keyword and semantic approaches
Organize with tags - You can add tags to conversations for easy organization and filtering. Tags work like labels you might put on file folders.
Analyze and monitor - The server can provide analytics about your conversation database, showing growth trends, content patterns, and health metrics.
Manage components - You can add or update different parts of a conversation, like adding analysis results or attaching files, without recreating the whole conversation.
Use templates - The server includes templates for common conversation types, making it easier to create new records.
Extend with plugins - The server supports plugins that can add custom functionality, like privacy controls or compliance features.
Who Would Use This?
Several groups of people might find this useful:
Customer support teams - Store and search support calls, track issues, analyze agent performance, and maintain compliance records.
Sales teams - Record sales conversations, extract action items, analyze what works, and generate meeting summaries.
Compliance and legal teams - Maintain conversation archives, apply privacy controls, track consent, and generate audit reports.
Researchers - Collect conversation datasets, study communication patterns, and build training data for machine learning models.
Developers - Build applications that work with conversation data using a standard format and API.
Business analysts - Search across conversations to find insights, track trends, and answer questions about customer interactions.
A Simple Example
Imagine you run a customer support team. You have thousands of support calls stored in a system. You want to know: "What are customers complaining about most this month?"
Without the vCon MCP Server, you might need to:
Export data from your phone system
Load it into a spreadsheet or database
Write queries or scripts to analyze it
Create reports manually
With the vCon MCP Server, you can simply ask your AI assistant: "What are customers complaining about most this month?" The assistant uses the server's search tools to find relevant conversations, analyzes them, and gives you an answer. If you want more detail, you can ask follow-up questions. The assistant has access to all your conversation data through the server.
Why Standards Matter
Both vCon and MCP are open standards. This means:
They are not controlled by a single company
Anyone can implement them
They work across different systems
They evolve through community input
They are documented publicly
Using standards gives you options. If you build on top of the vCon MCP Server and later want to switch to a different system, your data is in a standard format. You are not locked in. You also benefit from the work others do with these standards. New tools and integrations appear as the standards grow.
Getting Started
The vCon MCP Server is open source and free to use. You need:
Node.js installed on your computer
A Supabase account for the database (free tier available)
An AI assistant that supports MCP, like Claude Desktop
The server connects to your database and exposes tools that the AI assistant can use. You talk to the assistant in natural language, and it figures out which tools to use and how to use them.
What's Next?
This was a high-level overview. If you want to learn more, the next posts in this series cover:
How MCP works with AI assistants in more detail
The complete scope of what the server can do
How the server is built and why it is designed that way
Real-world business cases and use cases
Each post goes deeper into different aspects of the server. You can read them in order or jump to what interests you most.
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