Pixel Recorder 4.0 rolling out: Playback speed controls and more precise sharing

Abner Li | Nov 1 2022 - 9:51 am PT

Google released the last update to the Pixel’s Recorder app with Android 13 QPR1 Beta. The Pixel 7 and 7 Pro will launch with Recorder 4.0 with some nice usability tweaks, but a bigger multi-speaker support upgrade is coming later.

Update 11/1: Version 4.0 of Recorder is rolling out via the Play Store today to older Pixel phones (6 Pro in our case). It’s a slightly newer build than what debuted on the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro (4.0.483557824 vs 4.0.473637852), and not yet widely available.

First-generation Tensor devices do not currently support the three new languages (more on that below).

The other main change in Recorder 4.0 is to sharing. Besides that button now showing up in the main recording page, “File” and “Link” now appear in the bottom sheet.

You can “Set link access as”: Public, Share with specific people, or Private. The last behavior is unchanged, but the first two are new and more granular than the previous “Anyone with this link can view” option. Meanwhile, File lets you directly share the Audio (.m4a) or Transcript (.txt), with “Copy transcript to Google Docs” found in the overflow menu.

Original 10/6: Again, version 3.7 of Recorder is not yet available outside of the QPR1 preview. It adds support for the Android 13 media player, makes various Material You tweaks, and simplifies sharing.

The Pixel 7 series is running Recorder 4.0 and brings the ability to change the playback speed. When viewing a saved recording, open the overflow menu and you’ll find “Playback Speed” with the increment immediately noted. (A smaller tweak sees “Share” moved out of that menu and into the main app bar next to “Edit recording.”) Like on recorder.google.com (since June), your options are 0.5x, 1.0x, 1.5x, 2.0x, and 3.0x.

Meanwhile, English (India), Español (Estados Unidos), and Français (Canada) are now supported transcription languages. This joins US English, British English, Singaporean English, Irish English, Australian English, Japanese, German, French, Italian, or Spanish in Recording settings > Transcription language, for a total of 13.

A bigger feature that Google says is coming “soon” will let Recorder distinguish between different people, thanks to “Speaker labels” that “differentiate and transcribe each speaker’s words separately.” Currently, transcriptions just appear as a continuous block of text with multi-speaker support serving as a major upgrade for the Pixel Recorder.