Apple Voice Memos vs Google Recorder

• Google Recorder

  Google’s Recorder app can seize and transcribe audio fully regionally with out an web connection. Making it excellent 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 document and edit audio in your cellphone. As of iOS 18, it might 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 may want a technique to document a fast audio clip till it occurs. Each Google and Apple embody these apps by default on their telephones, however solely one among these apps is nice 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 potential to easily document and precisely transcribe nearly any spoken audio you may 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 information audio greatest may not matter to anybody who’s already dedicated to 1 working system or one other, however in the event you’re searching for a cause to leap ship, realizing how good your cellphone is at recording your conferences and lessons would possibly sway you. Here is how Apple’s Voice Memos and Google’s Recorder app examine.

Worth, 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 may additionally must ignore the truth that, a minimum of for now, they’re unique to their respective working techniques and telephones. Voice Memos is perhaps obtainable to obtain on the App Retailer, nevertheless it’ll solely ever run on an iPhone, barring some dramatic regulatory modifications. Recorder is perhaps on the Play Retailer, however for now, Google’s holding 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 as we speak, 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 means 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 holding it unique to {hardware} and a model of Android it particularly designed.

Voice Memos and Recorder have related approaches to design and navigation

There’s solely so some ways you may 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 best way 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 way of all the pieces extra particularly with a search bar up prime and instantly begin a recording by tapping on the large purple document button on the backside of the display screen.

When you’re truly in a recording, Google would not make issues that rather more difficult. You possibly can toggle between the waveform of your present recording and a transcript (it’s going to replace stay in the event you’re truly recording), cease and begin the recording by urgent the massive button on the backside, and alter the identify and placement of your recording by tapping on the identify on the prime. Whenever you’re pleased with what you captured, you’ve gotten the choice to delete or save what you simply did, and that is about it.

Voice Memos can be restrained. The primary 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 purple button on the backside for beginning a brand new recording. Except you in any other case rename your clips, they’re going to be named after the placement they had been recorded. Tapping on one expands the cardboard to disclose playback controls, a timeline you may scrub by way of, a button that takes you immediately 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.

Whenever you truly press that purple button to start out a recording, you may get a small recording window within the backside third of the app you can increase to once more view the entire waveform and the stay updating transcript. On this identical menu you may change the identify of your recording and reserve it. After you cease recording, you can too regulate the clip by altering its playback velocity or routinely eradicating silences.

If there are any distinctions to be drawn between the 2 apps, it is that Google virtually actually favors creating, viewing, and modifying transcripts, whereas Apple’s app nonetheless appears centered on listening to and taking part in again audio, virtually like the corporate imagines the instrument shall be extra helpful to audio professionals fairly than the typical individual attempting to document one thing.

You may get the same recording expertise in Recorder and Voice Memos, with one exception

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

Whenever you’re making a subject recording or utilizing your cellphone to document a lecture, each Voice Memos and Recorder will work whether or not your cellphone’s display screen is off or on. They will even allow you to begin or cease your recording as wanted if it’s important 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 attempting too laborious. The microphones on these gadgets aren’t designed to select one thing up a whole lot of toes away, however so long as you are in the identical room as your topic, and ideally inside talking distance, you may 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 potential to layer tracks on prime of one another. Due to the 4 “studio high quality mics” and the A18 Professional-enabled audio processing, you may hear again to a Voice Memos clip whereas recording a layer on prime of it, creating a brand new twin layer monitor. Apple imagines this might be good for capturing the sketch of a music, 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? In all probability not, nevertheless it’s a minimum of 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, a minimum of 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 once you transcribe it once more utilizing Google’s fashions within the cloud. Past that, new Pixels can even routinely establish when a recording has a number of audio system and label the transcript accordingly.

Voice Memos lets all the pieces run collectively into a protracted block of textual content, with lengthy pauses appearing as the primary information for when textual content must be damaged up. If you happen to’ve learn one among Apple’s automated transcripts within the Podcasts app, then you realize 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 stay identical to Google’s, however there isn’t any technique to transcribe audio once more after you have recorded it, nor any technique to actually edit your transcript itself aside from to rerecord a piece.

Recorder gives way more choices, together with all the pieces from relabeling audio system, and splitting up paragraphs of textual content into new audio system. It is not the cleanest modifying course of, however Google provides you instruments which are a lot simpler to entry than something in Voice Memos. That is to not say both app is inaccurate. In my checks, Voice Memos and Recorder had 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 may change in subsequent yr’s replace, however for now Recorder has the benefit.

Which recording app is best for you?

In the end, you may go along with the audio recording app that is pre-installed in your cellphone. That is the fact of a utility app like this, particularly one that you simply will not want till the event calls. When it comes to the uncooked recording and transcribing potential, although, Recorder comes out on prime. Google is nice 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 searching for a technique to seize a gathering after which flip it right into a shareable transcript.

Google Recorder

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

Possibly Apple views its app in another 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 individual. If you happen to’re searching for the very best audio recording app, go along with Google Recorder. In any other case, simply use what’s already in your iPhone and Pixel, you may nonetheless get what you want, and you will not have to vary 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 document and edit audio in your cellphone. As of iOS 18, it might probably additionally transcribe audio too.