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But which one wins an iPhone vs. Android transcription face-off?
Google is an old hand at transcription, having added it to the Recorder app five years ago.
But that’s not what I’m interested in testing here.
For this face-off, I used an iPhone 12 runningiOS 18.2and aPixel 8arunningAndroid 15.
I’d wager you’ll see similar results on newer iPhones and Pixels.
Here’s what my Voice Memo vs. Google Recorder transcription face-off revealed.
Recorder on the Pixel 8a introduced a few more errors, mostly in the form of mishead words.
(“Bastards” became “baskets” and “I” became “Hi.")
Whatever the reason, it made the Recorder transcript much more difficult to read.
It helps you see at a glance who said what.
(“Oh absolutely.")
That’s a lot of words for Voice Memos to ignore.
That can make it confusing to figure out who’s saying what just by referring to the auto-generated transcript.
(And right after Lisbon had been accurately transcribed from another speaker, too!)
And once again, a phantom speaker joined what should have been a two-person exchange.
Winner:Twist my arm, and it’s probably the Google Recorder app.
But it needs to do a better job distinguishing speakers.
Recorder’s biggest errors were mishearing phrases like “Google I/O” transcribed as “Google iron.”
But there’s a lot of room for those features to improve on both Android and the iPhone.
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