I knew I wasn’t the only one using Google Recorder for karaoke and rap lyrics

Last week, I covered the new editing tools that Google Recorder was receiving on the web. The ability to splice and crop audio was really one of the primary features many people I spoke to said was missing, and the company finally added it. Sure, the tool is still fairly utilitarian, but that’s Google’s specialty.

In that article, I came clean about how I use Recorder – as a personal karaoke capture tool. I joked about how I would record short snippets of myself singing to ear how it sounded or to capture quick song lyric ideas and riffs for my music.

…so we are starting to assume like, okay, well is this kind of a glorified grocery list maker? But it turns out it’s not. It’s just that people are using them in bite size chunks to brainstorm things like rap lyrics, which was a really interesting interview to go through. And then they’re doing voice overs. So, there’s a lot of actors that are doing voiceovers for maybe content they’re creating, or even for actual production samples.

Kristi Bradford, Product Manager at Google

Hilariously, it turns out that I’m not the only one to do this after all! In an interview on the Made by Google Podcast with Kristi Bradford, a product manager at Google, it was revealed that originally, Recorder was intended for longer recording sessions of things like college professor talks, and so on. However, most users, based on the tech giant’s statistics, are using it instead for shorter voice clips that are around three minutes long or less. Some use cases they’ve found are users audibly brainstorming ideas, recording or speaking rap lyrics (see?!) or performing voice over samples for production work.

While it may have been meant for things that would really kick Recorder’s transcription super powers into overdrive, it’s funny to hear Kristi joke her concern that the app was becoming a glorified shopping list. Luckily, she and her team, who are also responsible for the Google Clock and Calculator apps, are adamant about taking in feedback for each of their projects so they can improve them.

Let me know in the comments how and if you use Google Recorder, and what features you’d like to see come to it. I would personally love the ability to tie it directly to Google Keep, convert voice transcriptions to checklists and other rich text formats with AI or ML, and so on.

Kudos: 9to5Google