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One UI 7 brings call recording to Samsung phones in the US, but there's an obvious catch
- One UI 7 brings call recording to Galaxy users in the US.
- The phone will announce to participants that the call is being recorded.
- One UI 7 also adds text transcripts of the recordings.
Samsung phones have been able to record calls for years now, but the feature wasn’t available worldwide. Call recording has been absent in countries like the US and the UK. That’s about to change, with call recording becoming more widely available, including in the US.
After several delays, the One UI 7 beta finally came out last week, and it’s shaping up to be the biggest One UI update since its inception. When you’ve got drastic changes like the separation of the notification shade and quick settings, smaller updates can slip under the radar. One of those small changes is to call recording, which now has an alert to tell everyone they are being recorded, and Galaxy AI can generate transcriptions of the calls. The first of those changes has allowed Samsung to bring call recording to the US.
When you initiate the recording, the phone tells you that it will alert the other participant that the call is being recorded, and it gives you five seconds to cancel in case you hit the button by mistake. This alteration has allowed Samsung to bring the feature to the US. Different states have varying laws for giving consent to being recorded, so the phone alerting everyone that the call will be recorded complies with those laws; if the person on the other end of the line doesn’t consent, they can hang up. Apple has done the same with iOS 18, and Google also brought call recording and transcriptions to the Pixel 9 series earlier this year.
Once the call is over, you’ll get a notification that lets you see the transcription, which also shows in the call log. Like the voice recorder app transcriptions, it splits the transcription to look like a message thread, identifying the different speakers. The transcription itself isn’t always the best; in the example above, it thought I said, “Here’s that,” instead of what I actually said, which was, “Who’s there?” Thankfully, the audio recording is clear and crisp — hopefully, the transcriptions will improve with time.
Will you use call recording when you get One UI 7? If so, will the transcriptions be useful, or do you care more about the audio? Let us know in the comments.