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Pixel Watch 3's Recorder app is just as good as the phone version
- The Pixel Watch 3 comes with Google’s highly acclaimed Pixel Recorder app built-in.
- The app features a familiar UI and offers pretty much all the features you get on the phone version.
- You still have to rely on a connected Pixel phone to use AI-powered features like transcriptions and AI-generated summaries.
Google’s Pixel Watch lineup may not offer the best hardware, but the flagship smartwatches more than make up for it with a unique set of software features. This remains true for the recently launched Pixel Watch 3, which offers unmatched integration with several Google services and Pixel-exclusive apps that you won’t find on Wear OS smartwatches from other OEMs. The new Pixel Recorder app is a case in point.
Google has ported its highly acclaimed Pixel Recorder app to Wear OS for the Pixel Watch 3, and it’s just as impressive as it’s on Pixel smartphones. We’ve been playing with it over the last few days, and here’s a quick overview of all its features.
Pixel Recorder features on the Pixel Watch 3
The Recorder app on the Pixel Watch 3 has a familiar UI. It greets you with a large, red record button on the home screen. You can tap on it to quickly start a recording, and it uses the watch’s built-in microphone to capture your voice. The recording screen shows a timer along with buttons to pause or stop the recording.
If you scroll down on the home screen, you’ll find all your previous recordings right underneath the record button. You can even play the recordings on the smartwatch, with the playback screen offering controls to play/pause recordings, forward 10 seconds, rewind 5 seconds, and adjust the volume.
The playback screen also has a three-dot menu button that you can select to adjust the playback speed, view a transcript of the recording, or delete it. The “View transcript” button is merely a shortcut, though, and it prompts you to view the transcript on your phone. That’s to be expected, as the Pixel Watch 3 lacks the processing power you get with Pixel phones, and you have to rely on the phone version of the Recorder app to access the AI-enabled features.
The watch app has a Back up option that automatically syncs recordings on your watch to your Google account. This makes accessing all of the Recorder app’s AI-powered features for your watch recordings quite seamless. As soon as you switch over to your phone, you can view transcripts with automated speaker labels and get AI-generated summaries of the recordings. The phone version also lets you trim the recordings.
The Pixel Watch 3 comes with the Recorder app out of the box, but you may not see some of the features mentioned above. We can confirm that one of our review units came with an older version of the app that did not have these features. However, Google is rolling out an update (version 1.0.20240807.660310591) that should be available widely by the time you get your hands on your new watch.
