The best benefits of in-camera Pixel ownership are the exclusive software features like Recorder, which (as its name implies) record audio and transcribe it in the near future. Last year, the first signs of Google Drive backups were noticed. At the time, the bits of the feature that could be activated were claimed to be a new recorder.google.com website, which did not exist. The site is now available, and it promises the other half of the feature that is currently not working.
The site is up, but backup itself is not yet available.
The site is currently a landing page only, but for a very brief moment while loading you can get a look at other UI elements at the top and bottom of the screen. At the top of the page you can see a text feed field that is clearly marked ‘search in this recording’, so that you can sift through the contents of a transcript. At the bottom are the playback and volume controls, skipping five and ten seconds and forward (a progress bar, respectively, and a binary switch on the left).
The new web recorder interface on mobile devices.
We would guess, but I assume a list view of some kind for recordings and transcript content is displayed in the middle. The unknown switch can control something about the transcription mode, as it appears to indicate a link between column types, or it can adjust other aspects of the interface – who knows.
A close-up of the UI elements that are visible for a fraction of a second while the page loads.
The details behind the new backup mechanism are not disclosed by the website, which merely claims that “recordings backed up from the Recorder app on your Google Pixel will appear here.” However, many of the details were previously derived from an APK tear-off strip.
When it lands, the feature will allow you to back up your recording recordings on Google Drive with options for things like allowing it over mobile data. When deleting recordings, you will be asked if they should be removed from your backup and other synced devices or not. There is even a backup indicator in the account switch, if details have not changed since the feature was first demonstrated (all included in the screenshots below).
Images: XDA Developers
Currently, you can manually back up recordings yourself by sharing them to a target like Google Drive, but this is hardly convenient and certainly not automatic.
The new website invites you to learn more about Recorder on the old feature promotion website, but it has not yet been updated to name the backup feature.
With less than a week to March 1st (the first Monday of the new month, when Pixel updates usually land), and with a feature drop update expected this time around, I strong suspects the feature will be formally announced next week as part of the March feature update for Google Pixels. Previously, Recorder Assistant captured integration as part of the June Feature Drop.