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The Pixel's excellent Recorder app is coming to the web

Google is bringing this useful utility to the web.

What you need to know

  • Google will soon let Pixel owners access recordings made on the Recorder app via the web.
  • A new companion web client went live this week.
  • It's not yet available for use, with an update delivered to the Pixel's Recorder app itself yet to go live.

Google is finally bringing the Pixel's Recorder app to the desktop by way of a web app. Spotted initially by the folks over at 9to5Google, the app is a web mirror of sorts for the Recorder app. It won't be able to record sounds as you can do on the phone, but you'll be able to do everything else — as the placeholder page boldly declares.

The web client can be found over at recorder.google.com, albeit nonfunctional. An update to the regular Recorder app is apparently needed to enable the cross-device functionality, but one has yet to be made available at this time.

The Recorder app is a pretty useful tool that was one of the highlights of the Pixel 4 when it debuted. It's another example of Google using machine learning to solve simple, practical problems, and one of its most praised. Not only is it very accurate in capturing voices, but its transcription precision has been compared to that of a professional stenographer by the Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern.

I've gotten around the mobile-only limitations by copy and pasting transcribed text into the Google Keep app and having it sync to the desktop, and you could always share the transcriptions via the Share Sheet, but having it available right in a tab or a pinned web app would make the app that much more useful.

The Recorder app is currently available on all Pixels after the Pixel 2.

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