Your Chromebook might soon get one of the Google Pixel 9's best features

A new voice recorder is coming in ChromeOS 130

News By Hamish Hector published 9 October 2024

Google’s Recorder app on the Google Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro is one of its best AI-enhanced apps – we say as much in our Google Pixel 9 Pro review – thanks to its up to 40-minute-long real-time transcriptions. And soon a version of it will be coming to the best Chromebooks via the next ChromeOS 130 update.

That’s according to 9to5Google, which has revealed that the tool won’t just be coming to top-of-the-line Chromebook Plus devices – although these will get a few unique AI features, reportedly including a helpful offline speech-to-text tool that can function in real time on top of the usual voice-recording capabilities.

With a Chromebook Plus machine you’ll also get access to an on-device AI that can generate transcript summaries so It’s easier for you to flick through your notes later. To use these transcription tools on a Chromebook Plus you’ll apparently need to download an approximately 2GB AI model, while users of non-Plus Chromebooks will need to download a 100MB model to access the more limited recorder tools.

ChromeOS 130 doesn’t yet have a firm release date, but it's “Expected October 2024” per Google’s official ChromeOS releases page. So we hopefully won’t be waiting long for this new feature and update 130’s other upgrades.

More ChromeOS Recorder details

Best of all, because it looks like the transcriptions and recordings happen on-device, it should be more private and secure than sending your voice notes to a server to have an AI type them up, though if you do want to export your recordings and transcriptions manually you can.

The only downside of the ChromeOS Recorder app will be that at launch it’ll only understand US English – so it won’t be able to help you if you speak a different language, and there’s no word yet on when support for more languages will be added.

It’s also unclear if one of ChromeOS 130’s other features for Chromebook Plus devices – ‘Studio-style mic’, which uses AI to make you sound clearer by reducing noise from your microphone – will be used by the recorder tool. It’s possible, but currently it’s only linked to new video-call tools, so it could be that it won’t help clean up your voice recordings for now – we’ll have to wait and see when ChromeOS 130 rolls out later this month.

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