Companion site for Pixel Recorder app adds playback speed controls

One of the apps that sets Pixel phones apart from others is its Recorder app. Not because recording apps are unique to these phones at all, but because the one on the Pixels manages to outdo the competition by leveraging Google’s best-in-class Live Transcribe feature.

While many know the app and its capabilities, most don’t know that the Recorder app has a companion website where you can access your cloud recordings and their corresponding transcriptions. This website first became available in February 2021 by navigating to recorder.google.com and offers standard play/pause, rewind, and fast forward functionality, as well as options to share, download or delete a recording.

However, as spotted by 9to5Google, the website has recently rolled out the ability to play back at multiple speeds, similar to how it works in Google Podcasts. The current options for playback speed include 0.5x, 1.0x, 1.5x, 2.0x, and 3.0x. These all have use cases when they can be helpful, such as when you need to slow down the audio to make sure you catch mistakes or when you need to power through a long recording, and speeding it up is your best bet.

9to5 noted that the playback speed controls were added to the Recorder app on Pixel phones shortly after version 3.5 rolled out in March, which brought more “Material You” tweaks as well as a Quick Settings tile to the UI. So now, with the addition of playback controls on the web, the browser and app experience get even closer to feature parity — save for the recording capabilities.