Google Recorder for Samsung and other Android phones

Checked 1 November 2026 by the Murlivo team.

Why you cannot install Recorder on other phones

Google's own help page is clear: "Recorder app is only compatible with Pixel phones."¹

Search results for this question often lead to APK download sites. Those pages go back to 2019, when people shared a modified copy of Recorder for other phones. News sites at the time said the biggest requirement was a phone running at least Android 9 Pie or Android 10, and that Xiaomi phones did not seem to work.⁵ That copy is now years old. We found no report from Google that this copy is supported, and an app file from a mirror site is not checked by Google Play. It is not a real option today, and we do not recommend it.

What makes Recorder special

Most voice recorders on Android save sound. Recorder also turns it into text, and on a Pixel it does that on the phone itself. When Google explained how Recorder works, it wrote that its features "run entirely on-device, without the need for an internet connection."³ That is why people want it: the text appears while you speak, you can search your recordings by word, and the audio does not have to go to a server first.

Today Recorder makes live text in 15 languages and dialects on a Pixel 6 or newer, including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Hindi, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese.² Not everything stays on the phone. Google notes that transcribing a recording again, for example in another language, "may process audio files on Google servers", and that some languages may need internet access for summaries.²

What Recorder does better

We make Murlivo, so we want to be fair here. On a Pixel, Recorder is hard to beat:

• It is built in. There is nothing to install or set up on a Pixel phone.
• More than a transcript. It can label who is speaking (Pixel 6 and newer) and write an AI summary (Pixel 8 and newer).²
• Pixel Watch. It has a Wear OS app with a watch tile, and a Pixel Watch can sync recordings to the phone for the full transcript.^{1, 4}

If you own a Pixel and like how Recorder works, keep using it.

Your options on Samsung, Oppo, Xiaomi and Motorola

Samsung Voice Recorder with Transcript Assist

On a Galaxy phone, the pre-installed Voice Recorder app has Transcript Assist, part of Galaxy AI. It turns a recording into text and can summarize it. Samsung's own page lists the limits: the Transcription and Summary features "require a network connection and Samsung Account login", they work on recordings from the pre-installed Voice Recorder app (and on files from a few other Samsung apps, such as Samsung Notes), and audio files must be under 3 hours.⁶ Samsung also says that availability varies by country, One UI version and device model, and that service may vary by language.⁶ Basic Galaxy AI features are free today, but Samsung says future features may be paid.⁶

If you have a recent Galaxy phone, a Samsung account and a good connection, this is the easiest choice, because it is already on your phone.

Oppo, Xiaomi, Motorola and other brands

Other phone makers ship their own recorder apps, and some newer models add speech to text. What each one offers changes by model, region and software version, so check your phone maker's own help pages. We did not test them for this page.

Cloud transcription apps

Google Play has many transcription apps that work on any brand. Many of them send your audio to a server, where the text is made. For example, the privacy policy of Wear Audio Recorder says you sign in with your Google account, the audio file is uploaded to the developer's storage, and its server sends the audio to an outside speech-recognition service.⁷ Cloud apps can be accurate and fast, and they do not depend on how strong your phone is. But they need an internet connection, usually an account, and often a payment for longer recordings. Before you pick one, read its privacy policy to see where your audio goes.

Murlivo: text made on your phone, offline

Best for: people who want Recorder's main idea, text made on the phone with no internet, on a phone that is not a Pixel.

Murlivo is a free voice recorder for Android 11 and newer, from any brand. It turns your recordings into text on the phone itself. The speech model downloads once, the first time you use it; after that, recording and transcription work offline, even in airplane mode. It detects the spoken language, or you choose one of 20 languages. Each transcript goes into a plain Markdown file, one per day, in an Inbox folder inside a folder you choose, such as an Obsidian vault, with the audio kept in a subfolder. There is no account, no subscription and no ads. If you have a Wear OS watch, you can also start a recording from your wrist.⁸

Know its limits: Murlivo has no server copy of your notes and no web app.⁸ Because your phone does the work, how fast a transcript is ready depends on your phone.

How we checked

We make Murlivo and wrote this page, so read it knowing that. We checked every claim about Google Recorder and Samsung Voice Recorder against Google's and Samsung's own pages on 22 October 2026. Two sources are not from Google or Samsung: the 2019 news report about the modified Recorder copy, and the privacy policy of Wear Audio Recorder, our example of a cloud app. We did not install Recorder on a phone that is not a Pixel. If anything here is wrong or out of date, write to support@murlivo.com and we will fix it.

Questions

References

1. Google Pixel Watch Help: Record audio on your Pixel Watch, checked 22 October 2026.
2. Pixel Phone Help: Create, edit & manage transcriptions, checked 22 October 2026.
3. Google Research: The On-Device Machine Learning Behind Recorder (18 December 2019), checked 22 October 2026.
4. Recorder (Google) on Google Play, checked 22 October 2026.
5. SlashGear: Google Recorder unofficially available for other phones except Xiaomi (26 December 2019), checked 22 October 2026.
6. Samsung: Galaxy AI for business (Transcript Assist notes), checked 22 October 2026.
7. Wear Audio Recorder privacy policy (Transcription), checked 22 October 2026.
8. Murlivo product facts, checked 22 October 2026.