Pixel Recorder’s summaries are actually useful on the Google Pixel 9

Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority

The Pixel Recorder app is one of the best Pixel-exclusive features. It’s incredibly handy for those of us who need to record meetings, conduct interviews, or just save a voice note for later. The reason it’s so handy is because of its excellent, on-device transcription feature that runs in real-time. On some Pixel phones, the app can even generate a bullet point summary of your transcripts. Unfortunately, the Pixel Recorder’s summarization feature has been fairly useless so far, but that’s thankfully changing with the release of the Google Pixel 9.

To preserve privacy, the Pixel Recorder app uses an on-device AI model to generate summaries of your recordings. This on-device AI model is Google’s Gemini Nano, the mobile-optimized version of Google’s Gemini large language model (LLM). Although Gemini Nano is available on the entire Google Pixel 8 series, their version is the original one that Google released late last year.

In contrast, the new Google Pixel 9 series runs the latest version of Gemini Nano, dubbed Gemini Nano with multimodality. This more advanced version of Gemini Nano can parse image, audio, and speech inputs in addition to text. It powers several new Gemini AI-powered features on the Pixel 9, such as Call Notes and Pixel Screenshots.

Although both versions of Gemini Nano can handle text input, the original version running on the Google Pixel 8 can’t handle as much text as the new version running on the Google Pixel 9. As evidence of this, we noticed that the Pixel Recorder app on the Google Pixel 9 can now summarize transcripts of recordings that are over half an hour in length. Specifically, we were able to successfully generate a transcript of a recording that was 41 minutes in length. In contrast, the Google Pixel 8 Pro can’t even handle a recording that’s 20 minutes long.

In our brief testing, the Pixel 9 wasn’t able to summarize transcripts of recordings that were over an hour in length, but we don’t know the exact cut-off for when the Pixel Recorder app complains that the “transcript is too long.” Still, it’s clear that the cut off is much higher now, which is great news.

While the Pixel Recorder app’s summarization feature is much better on the Pixel 9 than on the Pixel 8, it still might not be useful enough for students trying to summarize lectures or journalists trying to summarize lengthy meetings. Hopefully, future versions of the Gemini Nano model will be able to handle even more text so that the Pixel Recorder app will stop complaining about transcripts being too long.

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