Google’s AI-powered voice recorder and transcription app comes to older Pixel phones
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Google's AI-powered voice recorder and transcription app comes to older Pixel phones
Google's AI-powered voice recorder app introduced at Google's October hardware event was one of the company's more impressive demos. The new app taps into advances in AI, speech processing, and speech recognition in order to automatically transcribe a voice recording with few mistakes, in real-time as the person is speaking. Unfortunately, Google's Recorder app was locked to Pixel 4 devices at launch. That has now changed.
As first spotted by Android Police, the Recorder app is available to Android users with older Pixel devices, including Pixel 2, Pixel 3, and Pixel 3a. The updated support was added to the app today, Sensor Tower also confirmed. But the lack of publicity around the launch has led it to see fewer than 1,000 downloads so far.
Google had previously announced its intention to make the app more widely available. In a recent Reddit thread, a company representative said the app would become available to more Pixel users in the future via a software update. They didn't say when that update would arrive, though.
While there are many voice recorder apps on today's market, there are fewer that offer real-time transcriptions. And of those that do - like Otter.ai, for example - the resulting text is often half-garbled. While these services can still be useful as a way to quickly find a section of a recording to then play back and manually transcribe, the lack of accuracy can limit adoption.
Google's Recorder app was demonstrated at Google's fall event as capable of taking a far more accurate transcription. Of course, the app was being not put to real-world use at the time - with different types of voices, accents, and background noise, it may no