Apple Voice Memos vs Google Recorder

• Google Recorder

  Google’s Recorder app can seize and transcribe audio totally domestically with out an web connection. Making it good for sophistication, conferences, or interviews.

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  Apple Voice Memos

  Apple’s Voice Memos app has come pre-installed on iPhones for years at this level, supplying you with the power to report and edit audio in your cellphone. As of iOS 18, it will probably additionally transcribe audio too.

Audio recording apps are the unsung heroes of each cellular working system as a result of you do not know you will want a method to report a fast audio clip till it occurs. Each Google and Apple embrace these apps by default on their telephones, however solely one in all these apps is sweet sufficient to be anybody’s go-to.

Google’s journey with audio recording began with the Recorder app on the Pixel 4. It has been on each Pixel since, and at this level it is well-known for its means to easily report and precisely transcribe nearly any spoken audio you’ll be able to throw at it. A easy use of synthetic intelligence, however a useful one. Apple launched its tackle a recording app with Voice Memos on iPhone OS 3 (what the cellular working system was referred to as till Apple modified it with iOS 4). It stayed largely unchanged with every model of iOS till iOS 18, when Apple determined so as to add the power to transcribe audio to the app in its slow push to adopt more AI-based features.

The apps reaching some semblance of characteristic parity is the right alternative to place them head-to-head. Which app data audio greatest won’t matter to anybody who’s already dedicated to 1 working system or one other, however in the event you’re in search of a cause to leap ship, understanding how good your cellphone is at recording your conferences and lessons would possibly sway you. This is how Apple’s Voice Memos and Google’s Recorder app examine.

Value, availability, and launch date

Voice Memos and Recorder are technically free apps, in the event you put aside the “price” of getting to create an Apple or Google Account to make use of them. You will additionally should ignore the truth that, not less than for now, they’re unique to their respective working techniques and telephones. Voice Memos is likely to be accessible to obtain on the App Retailer, however it’ll solely ever run on an iPhone, barring some dramatic regulatory modifications. Recorder is likely to be on the Play Retailer, however for now, Google’s preserving its options as a perk for present and future Pixel cellphone homeowners.

Voice Memos was launched on the iPhone 3GS in 2009, alongside such legendary options as copy, reduce, and paste, video recording, and Highlight seek for discovering contacts, emails, and apps. All these options exist on iOS right this moment, no matter how unusual it appears now that Apple launched two telephones earlier than it included what many assumed to be one thing as fundamental as copy and paste.

Recorder arrived with the Pixel 4 in 2019, leveraging the Pixel Neural Core to transcribe audio in a lot the identical manner Live Transcribe, an Android accessibility characteristic. By the point Google launched its fourth Pixel cellphone, it was already an previous hand at collaborating on smartphones. The novelty wasn’t simply that Recorder was utilizing on-device AI, it is that Google was preserving it unique to {hardware} and a model of Android it particularly designed.

Voice Memos and Recorder have comparable approaches to design and navigation

There’s solely so some ways you’ll be able to create an app that makes audio clips and have it make sense

You do not actually come to an audio recording app for adventurous design, and that is mirrored in the way in which each Voice Memos and Recorder look and work. They’re clearly utilities first, and it exhibits. In Recorder, Google dumps you right into a scrollable timeline of your recordings, damaged up by date. You possibly can comb by means of the whole lot extra particularly with a search bar up high and instantly begin a recording by tapping on the large pink report button on the backside of the display.

When you’re really in a recording, Google does not make issues that rather more difficult. You possibly can toggle between the waveform of your present recording and a transcript (it will replace dwell in the event you’re really recording), cease and begin the recording by urgent the large button on the backside, and alter the identify and site of your recording by tapping on the identify on the high. While you’re proud of what you captured, you’ve got the choice to delete or save what you simply did, and that is about it.

Voice Memos can also be restrained. The principle web page of Apple’s app is one other listing of recordings, organized by date together with your most up-to-date recording on the highest and a extra modest pink button on the backside for beginning a brand new recording. Until you in any other case rename your clips, they’re going to be named after the situation they have been recorded. Tapping on one expands the cardboard to disclose playback controls, a timeline you’ll be able to scrub by means of, a button that takes you instantly into the waveform for extra exact playback and viewing the transcript, and a three-dot menu for extra choices like sharing your recording or modifying it.

While you really press that pink button to start out a recording, you will get a small recording window within the backside third of the app you could increase to once more view the entire waveform and the dwell updating transcript. On this identical menu you’ll be able to change the identify of your recording and put it aside. After you cease recording, it’s also possible to regulate the clip by altering its playback velocity or mechanically eradicating silences.

If there are any distinctions to be drawn between the 2 apps, it is that Google nearly actually favors creating, viewing, and modifying transcripts, whereas Apple’s app nonetheless appears centered on listening to and enjoying again audio, nearly like the corporate imagines the instrument will likely be extra helpful to audio professionals fairly than the typical particular person making an attempt to report one thing.

You will get an identical recording expertise in Recorder and Voice Memos, with one exception

Apple and Google’s apps are equally able to recording audio

While you’re making a discipline recording or utilizing your cellphone to report a lecture, each Voice Memos and Recorder will work whether or not your cellphone’s display is off or on. They may even allow you to begin or cease your recording as wanted if you need to take a break. High quality is proscribed by the microphones in your smartphone, however at this late in each the Pixel and iPhone’s lives, you are going to seize usable audio with out making an attempt too exhausting. The microphones on these gadgets aren’t designed to select one thing up tons of of toes away, however so long as you are in the identical room as your topic, and ideally inside talking distance, you will seize what you want.

A method Apple differentiates the Voice Memos app on the iPhone, particularly the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max, is a brand new means to layer tracks on high of one another. Because of the 4 “studio high quality mics” and the A18 Professional-enabled audio processing, you’ll be able to hear again to a Voice Memos clip whereas recording a layer on high of it, creating a brand new twin layer monitor. Apple imagines this might be good for capturing the sketch of a track, letting you sing over the guitar half with your individual vocals, for instance. Is that sufficient of a cause to purchase an iPhone 16 Professional? Most likely not, however it’s not less than one thing that makes Voice Memos distinctive.

Recorder has the higher hand in relation to transcribing audio

Apple and Google are matched in accuracy, however not readability

Transcription is the place one app actually stands out from the opposite. Google has been engaged on audio to textual content transcription longer than Apple, not less than as a public-facing characteristic, and it exhibits. Recorder does a incredible job of transcribing textual content on the fly, and a fair higher job providing a clear transcript whenever you transcribe it once more utilizing Google’s fashions within the cloud. Past that, new Pixels can even mechanically determine when a recording has a number of audio system and label the transcript accordingly.

Voice Memos lets the whole lot run collectively into an extended block of textual content, with lengthy pauses performing as the primary information for when textual content ought to be damaged up. In case you’ve learn one in all Apple’s automated transcripts within the Podcasts app, then you recognize what you are moving into right here. It is serviceable, however a lot nearer to a primary draft than a last one. Apple’s app can transcribe dwell identical to Google’s, however there is no method to transcribe audio once more after you’ve got recorded it, nor any methodology to actually edit your transcript itself aside from to rerecord a piece.

Recorder affords much more choices, together with the whole lot from relabeling audio system, and splitting up paragraphs of textual content into new audio system. It isn’t the cleanest modifying course of, however Google provides you instruments which can be a lot simpler to entry than something in Voice Memos. That is to not say both app is inaccurate. In my assessments, Voice Memos and Recorder have been evenly matched of their output. It is simply {that a} transcript from Recorder is simpler to learn with labeled audio system and extra clearly broken-up textual content than what Apple spits out. Possibly that can change in subsequent 12 months’s replace, however for now Recorder has the benefit.

Which recording app is best for you?

In the end, you will go along with the audio recording app that is pre-installed in your cellphone. That is the truth of a utility app like this, particularly one that you just will not want till the event calls. When it comes to the uncooked recording and transcribing means, although, Recorder comes out on high. Google is sweet sufficient at recording audio, and significantly better than the competitors at transcribing it, that it ought to match the invoice for almost all of individuals in search of a method to seize a gathering after which flip it right into a shareable transcript.

Google Recorder

Google’s Recorder app can seize and transcribe audio totally domestically with out an web connection. Making it good for sophistication, conferences, or interviews.

Possibly Apple views its app in a different way than Google — that unique iPhone 16 Professional characteristic suggests Apple imagines musicians would possibly use Voice Memos — however that does not change the truth that Google’s app is extra helpful for the typical particular person. In case you’re in search of one of the best audio recording app, go along with Google Recorder. In any other case, simply use what’s already in your iPhone and Pixel, you will nonetheless get what you want, and you will not have to alter telephones.

Apple Voice Memos

Apple’s Voice Memos app has come pre-installed on iPhones for years at this level, supplying you with the power to report and edit audio in your cellphone. As of iOS 18, it will probably additionally transcribe audio too.