Google finds most use Pixel Recorder for short sessions

Abner Li | Jun 12 2023 - 9:14 am PT

Given its transcription capabilities, the Pixel Recorder app is billed as being useful for meetings, lectures, band practices, and family memories. However, Google has found that the “majority of these recorder sessions are three minutes or less,” with Pixel owners using the app for short memos.

This is according to a Made by Google Podcast interview with Kristi Bradford, a product manager on the Pixel Essential Apps team responsible for Recorder, Google Clock (including on Wear OS), and Calculator.

…so we are starting to assume like, okay, well is this kind of a glorified grocery list maker? But it turns out it’s not. It’s just that people are using them in bite size chunks to brainstorm things like rap lyrics, which was a really interesting interview to go through. And then they’re doing voice overs. So, there’s a lot of actors that are doing voiceovers for maybe content they’re creating, or even for actual production samples.

This is interesting in the context of how iOS has the Voice Memos app, which from a naming perspective, more accurately reflects the short-form nature of how people are using the app and possibly why Apple hasn’t introduced voice transcription yet.

The interview has an interesting bit about how this team, in particular, takes into account user feedback:

…we get a lot of inspiration about new features, not only from Google Research and what’s newly available, specifically for audio, but from our users directly. So the UXR and then you know, the most vocal users that send in feedback, we go over that every month and then obviously when we’re planning the roadmap.

Google described adding new features as a “mix of balancing what users are directly requesting because we want to make sure that they’re getting everything that they need out of it with an overall vision of what’s the next phase of audio technology.” It most recently introduced Speaker Labels, which doubles down on the long-form use case.