Why voice recorder and transcription apps get 1 star: 6,907 Play reviews counted

Checked 1 November 2026 by the Murlivo team.

Conflict of interest: we make Murlivo, a voice recorder for Android that competes with the apps on this page, so we gain if their users look elsewhere. To keep this fair, we count every app with the same rules, quote reviewers word for word, and publish how precise each keyword group is and where the method falls short. A number about an app tells you what its reviewers wrote. It is not a test we ran on the app.

App store ratings hide the reasons. A 4-star average can sit on top of hundreds of angry reviews, and each of them says why the person gave up. We read the newest written reviews of the apps people find when they search Google Play for voice recording and transcription, sorted the 1-star reviews into themes with keyword groups in five languages, and checked a sample of each theme by hand.

The data at a glance

Why people give 1 star

Each row is one keyword group. A review can fall into more than one theme, so the shares do not add up to 100%. 940 of the 2,134 1-star reviews (44.0%) match at least one theme. Many of the other 1,194 are too short to say why: 431 of them have three words or fewer, such as "very poor".

The per-app tables below list every app with at least one matching 1-star review. A share is shown only for apps with at least 20 1-star reviews; for smaller apps a percentage would mean little.

1. Money: prices, trials and paywalls

Almost one in three 1-star reviews talks about money. The share is highest for Voice Recorder & Transcriber (57.0%), Smart Noter (45.5%) and Wave (45.4%), and lowest for Live Transcribe (2.2%), whose 1-star reviews are about other things (see theme 7).

Charged, trial, cancel or refund trouble

265 1-star reviews are about the bill itself: a charge people did not expect, a trial that turned into a payment, or a subscription they could not cancel.

"I set up the free trial and cancelled the subscription before the free trial ended. They have proceeded with upgrading my account and have charged my card."

"I was charged before my free trial ended."

Asked to pay before they could use the app or reach their own recordings

75 1-star reviews say the app asked for money before it did anything useful, or held back the person's own recording or transcript until they paid. 44 of them are about one app, Voice Recorder & Transcriber, in English and Spanish.

"after first recording they asking to pay for the app, without paying u cannot even listen to what u recorded"

"Doesn't even let you move your own recordings from the app without paying the subscription. Possession of your own recordings is the bare minimum for a recording app."

Time limits on recordings or transcripts

38 1-star reviews are about minutes: a free plan of a few minutes, a cap on uploads, or a recording that stopped early.

"it limits you to 10 uploads or 1200 minutes. Whichever comes first."

2. Lost, empty or unsaved recordings

Only 48 1-star reviews, but they describe the worst outcome for a recorder: a meeting, lecture or interview that is gone. Several say the person found out only afterwards.

"after the hour it just deleted my file for no reason at all."

"only to discover that the audio does not save locally prior to attempting an upload."

3. Crashes, freezes or stops mid-recording

67 1-star reviews. The two apps with the highest share are Wear Audio Recorder (13.3%) and Wave (11.1%).

"It often does NOT record the voice/conversation. Or it stalls/crashes in the middle of the recording."

"The app consistently fails during recordings, and when it does, there’s no way to recover the file."

4. Watch-to-phone sync or connection fails

Four apps in the data are Wear OS recorders: Wear Audio Recorder, Voice Recorder for Wear OS, Wear Voice Recorder and Capture Flow. Of their 256 1-star reviews, 42 (16.4%) say the watch and the phone do not find each other, or the recording does not reach the phone. For Voice Recorder for Wear OS it is 40.0% of its 1-star reviews.

"Watch and phone don't recognize each other"

"Recordings won't transfer from watch to phone"

5. Poor transcription accuracy

47 1-star reviews, 2.2%. Accuracy is the theme our keywords miss most (see the method), so the real number is higher, but even so it is far behind money.

"it had a lot and I mean a lot of mistakes like 3 every sentence"

6. Sign-in or account problems

45 1-star reviews: a sign-in that does not work, a forced Google or Microsoft login before the app can be tried, or an account that cannot be deleted.

"Don't make users give you access to their Gmail or Facebook before they can even test the tool."

7. Installed without asking or cannot be removed

This theme belongs almost entirely to one app. 70 of the 369 1-star reviews of Live Transcribe (19.0%) say the app is on their phone without their choice, or that they cannot uninstall it.

"Forced bloatware. Installed without consent. Can't disable, can't uninstall"

8. Needs internet, or "offline" that is not

Rare: 11 1-star reviews. 4 of them are about TranscriAI (listed on Google Play as "Offline Transcribe, TranscriAI") and 3 about Offline Voice Input, two apps with "Offline" in their name.

"It is not offline. The name says offline but its not"

"useless in remote areas without a connection"

9. Ads

Also rare: 13 1-star reviews, 0.6%. In this category, people complain about paying far more than about ads.

1-star share by app

These shares are of the newest written reviews we collected, not of all ratings. The star rating on Google Play also counts ratings without text, so it can be much higher.

What this means when you choose an app

• Before you pay, make one short test recording and check that you can play it back, read the text and export both.
• Before you start a free trial, find out how to cancel it, and set a reminder for the day before it ends.
• If you record in places with a weak signal, try the app in airplane mode first.
• With a watch, record once with the phone out of reach, then check that the recording arrives on the phone.

Where Murlivo stands

We built Murlivo around the complaints above. It works on any Android phone with Android 11 or newer. It transcribes on the phone itself, offline after a one-time download of the speech model, so the audio stays on your devices; how fast it is depends on the phone. It is free, with no ads, no subscription and no account, and it saves each recording as a Markdown note in a folder you choose. A Wear OS watch is an optional extra.¹ Murlivo is new and has very few reviews, so it is not in this data.

How we counted

1. Collection. We used the open-source google-play-scraper tool to pull up to 1,000 of the newest written reviews per app. The July set covers the top apps of a Google Play search for transcription apps, from the US English store. The October set adds Wear Audio Recorder (US English store) and 12 newer apps found in Google and Google Play searches, from the English (US), German, Spanish, French and Brazilian Portuguese stores.
2. Duplicates. We kept one review per app and review id. We found no duplicates.
3. Themes. Each theme is a group of keywords and short phrases in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and German, matched on lower-case text with accents removed. Two themes need two kinds of word: "asked to pay" needs a payment word and a word such as "use", "listen" or "export"; "watch-to-phone" needs a watch word and a word such as "sync", "connect" or "phone". Some themes skip known false hits, such as "lost my time".
4. Hand check. For each theme we read 20 random matching 1-star reviews (all of them when there were fewer than 20) and counted how many were really about that theme. That is the precision below.
5. Misses. We read 40 random 1-star reviews of four words or more that matched no theme. 13 of them did fit a theme, most often accuracy. So the counts on this page are lower bounds.

Limits

• Keywords are blunt. They catch some reviews that only mention a word, and they miss reviews that describe a problem in other words. Read each count as "about this many", and the shares as a ranking more than exact values.
• Who writes reviews. Google Play gives the newest reviews first, up to a limit, and only people who chose to write one. Unhappy users write more often than happy ones, so the 1-star shares say nothing about how many users are unhappy.
• Which apps. The apps come from searches, not from a random sample of the market, and the big apps weigh more: Voice Recorder & Transcriber alone has 447 of the 2,134 1-star reviews.
• Time. Reviews run from 2016 to 2026; Wear Audio Recorder's go back to 2016. An old review can describe a problem the developer has since fixed.
• Language. Most reviews are in English, and the July set and Wear Audio Recorder come only from the US English store. Our keywords are richer in English than in the other four languages.
• No app tests. We did not test the apps for this page. The quotes are what reviewers say happened to them.
• Our interest. We make a competing app. We chose the themes before we wrote this page, and the counts come from the same script for every app.

The reviews are public on each app's Google Play page. To check a number, ask for the keyword lists, or report a mistake, write to support@murlivo.com.

References

1. Murlivo product facts, checked 22 October 2026.
2. Voice Recorder & Transcriber on Google Play, the source of its reviews, checked 22 October 2026.
3. Notta-Transcribe Audio to Text on Google Play, the source of its reviews, checked 22 October 2026.
4. Smart Noter - AI Note Taker on Google Play, the source of its reviews, checked 22 October 2026.
5. OtterAI Transcribe Voice Notes on Google Play, the source of its reviews, checked 22 October 2026.
6. Wave AI Note Taker & Recorder on Google Play, the source of its reviews, checked 22 October 2026.
7. Wear Audio Recorder on Google Play, the source of its reviews, checked 22 October 2026.
8. Voice Recorder for Wear OS on Google Play, the source of its reviews, checked 22 October 2026.
9. Wear Voice Recorder on Google Play, the source of its reviews, checked 22 October 2026.
10. Capture Flow: Wear OS Recorder on Google Play, the source of its reviews, checked 22 October 2026.
11. Live Transcribe & Notification on Google Play, the source of its reviews, checked 22 October 2026.
12. AI Transcribe. Speech to Text (MeetGeek) on Google Play, the source of its reviews, checked 22 October 2026.
13. Offline Transcribe, TranscriAI on Google Play, the source of its reviews, checked 22 October 2026.
14. Offline Voice Input on Google Play, the source of its reviews, checked 22 October 2026.
15. Transcribe Voice to Text Noker on Google Play, the source of its reviews, checked 22 October 2026.
16. Transcriber for WhatsApp on Google Play, the source of its reviews, checked 22 October 2026.
17. Yaps: AI Voice Typing Keyboard on Google Play, the source of its reviews, checked 22 October 2026.