Google's New Voice Recorder App Transcribes in Real Time, Even When Offline

At Google's hardware event this morning, the company introduced a new voice recorder app for Android devices, which will tap into advances in real-time speech processing, speech recognition and AI to automatically transcribe recordings in real time as the person is speaking. From a report: The improvements will allow users to take better advantage of the phone's voice recording functionality, as it will be able to turn the recordings into text even when there's no internet connectivity. This presents a new competitor to others in voice transcriptions that are leveraging similar AI advances, like Otter.ai, Reason8, Trint and others, for example. As Google explained, all the recorder functionality happens directly on the device -- meaning you can use the phone while in airplane mode and still have accurate recordings. "This means you can transcribe meetings, lectures, interviews, or anything you want to save," said Sabrina Ellis, VP of Product Management at Google. The Recorder app was demonstrated onstage during the event, live, and was offering -- from what was shown -- an error-free transcription.

"All the better..

[Rick Schumann]

..to surveil you with, my dear!", said the wolf.

Re:

[rtb61]

At least when they secretly surveil you, you get to insult them in the most salacious manner, quite legally and they transcribe it for you, archive it and have to read your insults of them (speak you mind freely when you are being secretly tracked in private space be creative and don't care, just don't share it and if they do well its their choice to make it public you insults of them, in affect them insulting themselves as they made those insults public, search on the internet would could as that private s

Been doing this for years.

[pecosdave]

The trick is to get it to STOP doing this and uploading it in the background.....
Even when the phone appears to be off.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

Was this what LG and Vizio did with their TV's [forbes.com] a few years back? It'd appear to be off but really it's speech-to-text'ing or just recording 100% of the time. That and some other nasty stuff the article goes into sounds like a great reason to perma-ban those companies from the living room.

Well, they should have sold it as a feature!

[BAReFO0t]

And predate Amazon by years!

Chairman Pooh Bear Appreciates it, Google.

[Seven Spirals]

This way your entire day's conversation and everyone who is unfortunate enough to be exposed to your Google infection will be transcribed and sent to the AI Authority for Order & Decency weather you are Chinese or not. Troublemakers can be appropriately blacklisted and profiled for thought crime or future crime. How many minutes do you think this will last before being abused by governments and corporations alike?

Adding insult to injury

[Dirk Becher]

Is it possible that the only reason Google releases software is to mock the general public about all the data they have extracted from them without their consent and knowledge?

Tin foil addon.

[RightSaidFred99]

Sounds like, based on the replies in this thread, Google should start marketing a tin foil hat addon for these devices. Ironically, said tinfoil hat should have 3 cameras, 5 far field microphones, and a DNA sequencer onboard.

Re:

[markdavis]

>"Sounds like, based on the replies in this thread, Google should start marketing a tin foil hat addon for these devices."

And based on Google's past behavior, it is not unreasonable to believe that what you transcribe "locally" won't still end up on one of their servers and also "analyzed".

Can this be used locally, with local encryption? No
Can it be used with end-to-end encryption if not local? No
Can this be used without a Google account? No
Can you create an anonymous Google account now? No
Can we see

Aaah, are you a NSA leak denier, perchance?

[BAReFO0t]

Somebody who calls every statement that rattles his nice delusion ... of everyone in the world dancing a cheerful ring-around-a-rosy-colored-glasses in a barefoot flower dress on sunny washing detergent ad meadows ... a "conspiracy theory". Especially about such nice state authorities and large coprorations, who never did anything wrong!
How horrible, to make you come from your slumber under the sand... a monster that messenger be...eth...edeth...e!

test cases

[sheramil]

1: Tobacco auction

2: Mumble rap

3: Those guys who keep calling me to tell me "my computer is infect with virus"

So like Dragon NaturallySpeaking?

[BAReFO0t]

Or IBM ViaVoice?

Which worked on a 486DX2-66 with 32MB RAM but recommended a whopping 64MB for reliably high recognition rates.

Wanna bet this offline version does also not go above 98-99% recognition, and also has trouble with accents and mumbling and background noises?
But of course, it will consume resources by the truckload anyway.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

Totally correct about the speech-to-text technology being around a long ass time. ViaVoice has a halfway respectable Linux API also. Of course, the bigger and nastier implications in this case are just that Google is toying with the idea of having that crap "always on" which of course will result in rogue applications (or Google themselves) stealing your entire day's conversations nicely transcribed into searchable text.

right

[superwiz]

So the recorder app still won't record. Got it. Not being able to record phone conversations is the main power imbalance between corps and institutions.

An ad company

[AHuxley]

will do ads 24/7.
Privacy and "off" is not something an ad company accepts.

Only on Pixel 4

[bill_mcgonigle]

Geeze, that was waste of time.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Good sign of things to come though. No need for AI assistants to transmit what you are saying back to the mothership if they can decode it locally. Also eliminates the delay due to the round trip.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Realtime voice transcription is supposed to be coming to all Android 10 devices. Or at least, they had announced it would be an included feature of Android Q.

As an only peripherally related aside, the new Android is starting to roll out to Android One devices now... except for Motorola. That was the whole reason I bought my X4 Android One edition. If it never gets upgraded, Moto is dead to me, and so is Lenovo in general.

Re:

[UnderCoverPenguin]

And, notably, this reportedly error free transcription feature is not available on their online transcription system. I still get sentences transcribed like "This matter has been are time sensitive." - from someone speaking broadcast-news-standard American English.

Captain's log

[overblod]

Stardate -303211.20, today I watched the Google's pixel 4 launch event, the world is truly catching up to Star Trek.

text is cheaper to send to Google

[meander]

Am I being Tin Foil Hat here?

Google likes to listen to you, but it is hard to send long audio files over the internet, even as a low quality mp3, it takes up a lot of the data bandwidth on your phone. Tricky.

However, converting it into a text file means you can save a day's worth of text in very much less than a megabyte. (a very large book can be 1/2 megabyte of text). Much cheaper to send this smaller file regularly. Rather unnoticeable, in fact.

Why do I feel uneasy?

Google Translate

[turp182]

My kids go to a language immersion school, and while they know a lot of French words they aren't that proficient at sentences/grammar.

Last night's homework involved some sentences to be written in French. They wrote them in English first, then used Google Translate to compose the French.

What I found amazing is that Google Translate changed the order of the words so that it was proper French. I watched my daughter type a word on the end of the English version and Translate put it in the middle of the sente

Re:

[iampiti]

Automatic translations tools have gotten pretty good. Most of the time they sound pretty natural and you can't tell they've been performed by a program. We're long past the days of word-by-word substition translations.

Re:

[turp182]

This is the most insidious way to cheat on grammar homework ever!

I approve, I had some pretty slick schemes back in the day (TI calculators and IR messaging).

Watching the word just jump into the middle of a sentence was pretty incredible (where it would be in a different place in the English version).

Re:

[iampiti]

It really is. Of course if you're really interested in learning the language you'd be better served by doing things yourself. But I guess your kids care more about getting the homework done