Longer-term take on Google’s Recorder app: a human in the loop remains needed
Over the last six months, one of the apps I’ve used most on my phone has been one of the few that I can only use on my phone–Google’s Pixel-only Recorder. The free voice-transcription app that I latched onto after ditching Evernote has become a regular part of my workflow, even as it’s made its limits more obvious to me.
Recorder’s core advantage remains the ability to work offline, which is good on both functional and privacy grounds. I’m stuck on horrible WiFi or in a cellular dead zone? No problem. A sensitive conversation with a source that I don’t want instantly uploaded to a cloud-based transcription service? Handled.
(That second scenario has yet to actually come up in my work; if, however, somebody summons me to a clandestine meeting in a garage in Rosslyn, it’s nice to know I’ll be ready.)
But maybe because this app has to rely on the processing power of the Pixel 9 Pro I bought nearly two years ago instead of borrowing any cloud smarts, it continues to make the same mistakes:
- Its speaker recognition is more of a cloud of probability; in one transcript of a four-person panel last week, the app IDed me as “Speaker 1,”Speaker 2,” and “Speaker 3” while labeling only one quote as coming from “Speaker 4.”
- It continue to capitalize random nouns–in particular, hitting its virtual Shift key for “Enterprise” when transcribing conversations about the computing needs of large organizations so often that I have to wonder if it was trained on Star Trek, German, or both.
- Sometimes it just skips a sentence or two or three. I don’t know how that’s possible, considering there’s no break in the recorded audio, unless maybe my phone’s processor got briefly swamped.
But even with these repeatable glitches, cleaning up a transcription rarely requires more than one playback while I have Recorder’s transcription open in an editing app–usually Google Docs, since that’s one of Recorder’s supported export options and since that Web app can itself work offline.
Google’s updates to the app haven’t yet made a meaningful difference in its transcription accuracy but have added the option to get an AI-generated summary of a transcript. That, too, works offline, and I should try that more often.
My overall take remains unchanged from what I wrote here in March: While this app could work better, I’d still want to/have to check any AI transcription against the original recording, so this one isn’t adding that much work. And it retains its non-trivial edge of costing nothing when I already pay enough for cloud services and can only expect those expenses to keep ratcheting up.
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