Google’s voice transcription Recorder app is coming to older Pixel phones

Google’s Recorder app, introduced for the Pixel 4, will be made available on older Pixel devices in the near future. A Google employee shared the news on Reddit (via Android Police).

Still not mass-market — The Google employee didn’t clarify which older Pixels will be receiving Recorder. Regardless, Pixel owners make up a relatively small subset of Android users. It'd be in Google's best interest to make the app available for non-Pixel devices (including iOS) as it's done with its other AI-powered services, like the Google Duplex.

The critics are raving — Early reviews of the app have been mostly positive, save for when users have thick accents or talk abnormally fast as tested by the Wall Street Journal. Recorder uses on-device machine learning to transcribe voice recordings in real time rather than processing it in the cloud. It’s a potentially huge time saver for journalists and others who record and transcribe often. Older AI-powered tools like Trint may be fine for best-case scenarios where there's clean audio, but Google’s Recorder could potentially make manual transcription a thing of the past.