GoKawiilSanuj Bhatia / Android Authority
As bearish as I’ve been on AI tools lately — partly because they’re coming after my bread and butter — one category I’ve consistently relied on is AI note-taking tools. I’ve been using these online notetaker tools for online meetings and media briefings for the past year or so. And honestly, they’ve been incredibly useful. When you’re attending multiple briefings every week, it’s impossible to remember every detail, quote, and specification off the top of your head.
The problem, though, is that AI infrastructure isn’t cheap, and running these services is a high cost for the companies that provide them. As these tools have become more advanced, subscription prices have gone up.
Over the past few months, however, I’ve heard from several fellow journalists that Google’s Pixel Recorder app is surprisingly capable and can deliver at least part of the experience offered by dedicated AI note-taking services. After using it extensively myself, including during my recent trip to Taipei for Computex 2026, I’ve actually ended up canceling my AI note-taking subscription altogether.
Would you trust your phone to replace a dedicated AI note-taking service? 10 votes Yes, already do 50 % Maybe, depending on features 20 % No, I need meeting bots 10 % I don't use either 20 %
Google Pixel’s Recorder app is much smarter than people take it to be
Ryan Haines / Android Authority
With the launch of the Pixel 9 series in 2024, Google revamped the Recorder app on Pixel phones, adding support for on-device Gemini Nano with multimodality. What this meant was that the Recorder app wasn’t only able to record audio, but also analyze it and generate live transcripts with on-the-fly punctuation and grammar corrections.
This means the app gives you a live transcription of whatever is being said whenever it is recording. Not only that, but thanks to Gemini, the Recorder app can also label multiple speakers if you’re attending a meeting with a lot of people. This makes it much easier to skim through who said what and jump between different parts of a conversation later on.
Plus, the best part of this tool, in my opinion, is that you can see all recordings and transcripts in the recorder’s web app. Just by going to recorder.google.com and signing in with the same Google account, you can access all the recordings and transcripts from your desktop device directly.
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