Your Chromebook may soon get one of the Google Pixel 9’s best features
Google’s Recorder app on the Google Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro is one of the best AI-enhanced apps – we say as much in our Google Pixel 9 Pro review – thanks to its real-time transcriptions of up to 40 minutes. And a version of it will soon be coming to top Chromebooks via the next ChromeOS 130 update.
That is according to 9to5Googlewhich has revealed that the tool won’t just be coming to the top Chromebook Plus devices – although these will get a few unique AI features, including reportedly a handy 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 also get access to an on-device AI that can generate transcript summaries, making it easier to sort through your notes later. To use these transcription tools on a Chromebook Plus, you’ll apparently need to download a roughly 2GB AI model, while non-Plus Chromebook users will need to download a 100MB model to access the more limited recorder tools.
ChromeOS 130 does not have a final release date yet, but according to Google’s official version it is “expected in October 2024” ChromeOS releases page. So hopefully we won’t have to wait long for this new feature and update 130’s other upgrades.
More ChromeOS Recorder details
Best of all, because the transcriptions and recordings appear to take place on the device, it should be more private and secure than sending your voice notes to a server, where they can be typed by an AI. If you would like to export your recordings and transcripts manually, you can.
The only downside to the ChromeOS Recorder app is that it only understands American English at launch – so it can’t help you if you speak another language, and there’s no word yet on when support for more languages will be added.
It’s also unclear whether any of ChromeOS 130’s other features for Chromebook Plus devices – ‘Studio Style Microphone’, which uses AI to make you sound clearer by reducing the noise from your microphone – will be used by the recorder tool . That’s possible, but currently it’s only tied to new video calling tools, so it might not help clean up your voice recordings for a while. We’ll have to wait and see when ChromeOS 130 releases later this month.