Tag: PIXEL 4

The polls have closed, and after nearly 7,500 of you voted, there was a clear winner that emerged from our 2019 Readers’ Choice Smartphone of the Year ballot: the Google Pixel 4 and 4 XL, beating out the OnePlus 7 Pro family.

Understanding just why the Pixel remains the top choice among our readers isn’t difficult: clean software with quick updates (well, usually), industry-leading photography performance, and early access to the newest features of many of Google’s other products like the next-generation Assistant and Stadia. The editors of Android Police gave the Pixel 3a our pick for 2019 under similar reasoning.

While the Pixel 4 has had a slightly troubled launch with lukewarm critical reception, it’s still the best phone for anyone who places Google above all else in their digital lives. That shouldn’t be surprising, given Google makes it, but it does continue to underscore the fact that phones from other manufacturers—even those which are updated nearly as quickly—simply don’t have everything the Pixel offers. No other brand of smartphone has access to the next-generation Google Assistant, none have access to Google Stadia, and none yet support Android 10’s new face unlock biometrics.

And the camera, well, I could go on forever about how wonderfully Google’s Super Res Zoom works with the new telephoto lens, or I could just share a photo.

I have my own gripes with the Pixel 4, but when I ask myself which phone I want in my pocket when I want to snap a photo, I can’t imagine choosing anything else. The Pixel 4 has already preserved memories that I will likely hold onto for the rest of my life, and those photos just feel so much more lifelike than I ever thought images captured on a smartphone could (Ryne Hager has at times accused the pictures from the Pixel of looking “too real”).

So, clearly Google is still doing some of the important things right with phones, at least among Android Police readers.

Among the new features onboard the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL phones is a Recorder app that can transcribe spoken audio in real-time—a tool that could prove hugely useful in lectures, interviews, and more besides. It works offline too, but it’s not your only option for converting speech into text.

If you have bought a Pixel 4 or Pixel 4 XL, you’ll find the Recorder app preinstalled (or you can download it here). The app can be sideloaded via an APK on other Android phones, but the real-time voice transcription won’t work—this is one of those features (like Motion Sense) that Google is hoping will get you to buy one of its new flagship phones.

Once loaded up, the app has a simple but tasteful design: You hit the big red record button and recording starts, as you would expect. The recording opens the Audio tab, which shows a sound wave representation of what’s being heard, but you can switch back and forth between that and the Transcript screen, where speech is transcribed in real-time.

Recorder recognizes the difference between speech and music, and will show this on screen as part of the Audio tab. Transcription only works with speech, however, or at least it does with the songs we tried (if you want to try and decipher a particularly difficult to understand set of lyrics, you’ll need to look elsewhere).

Tap the pause button at the bottom and you can give your recording a title and a location if you want to (if the Recorder app has noticed certain words being repeated, it’ll suggest these as keywords for your title). You then have the option to Resume the recording or to Save it to your phone.

Does it work? Based on our experience, it works impressively well, but it’s far from perfect—the app doesn’t get every word yet, though with clear speech and little background noise we’d say it’s in the high 90s in terms of percentage. We did notice occasional gaps in the transcription, almost as if the Pixel’s AI processing algorithms were being overwhelmed and had to take a breather.

When there’s more going on in the background—recording from talk radio, say—the accuracy starts to drop, though to be fair to the Recorder app we were testing it on UK voices and accents. The app only officially supports US English for now, with more languages appearing further down the line.

Unfortunately there’s no option yet to edit the transcription. Though you can search through the text of your recordings, so it’s easy to find mentions of particular words. Even better, you can search for specific sounds, like whistling, applause, or music, and Recorder pulls up a list of matches for you.

As with just about everything Google does, machine learning is key to how this all works: It’s managed to shrink its language processing model down to a small enough size for it to fit on the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL, and the Pixel 4 phones use similar techniques to power Google Lens and the Now Playing song recognition on device.

The transcription alternatives

Pick up a Pixel 4, and the Recorder app comes free with it. As for the competition, the closest alternative to what Recorder does is Otter—developed by ex-Googlers, as it happens—which again uses the power of artificial intelligence to identify spoken words as they’re said, either live or from a recording.

That ability to process recordings sets Otter apart from Google’s Recorder app, and Otter is also able to identify different speakers in a conversation, something Recorder hasn’t stretched to yet. Transcription search is included too. For the live transcription, you need the apps for Android or iOS, and you get a generous 600 minutes of free transcription time per month.

Beyond that, you’ll need to pay $10 a month or $100 a year, and that gets you extra features, including custom vocabulary support, integration with Dropbox, the ability to skip silences, and more. If you don’t own a Pixel 4 (or maybe if you do), it’s well worth a look, and in our tests was about on a par with the Recorder app.

You’ll find a number of competing Otter-like services out there, leveraging AI to do the transcription work, though none of the others have graduated to real-time transcription as yet. Temi promises 5-minute turnarounds for audio uploaded to the site (or recorded via the Android or iOS apps), and you can edit the transcripts online if needed.

We found Temi matched its quick turnaround claim and impressed with its accuracy, based on our limited testing of it. You get one trial transcript (up to 45 minutes) for free, and then processing costs $0.10 per minute (you might prefer that pay-as-you-go flexibility to Otter’s flat rate, depending on how much transcribing you need).

Trint is another option for those looking for AI-powered speech transcription, though it only has an iOS app (nothing for Android yet), and the real-time processing component is only available to enterprise users.

It’s on the expensive side though, compared to Otter and Temi—after your 7-day free trial, you need to stump up $15 per hour of recordings, or $40 a month. The latter gets you three hours of free transcription (working out at $13.33 per hour). It does come stacked with features, including a comprehensive online editor.

Of course, you can still get your transcribing done by an old-fashioned human, if you want to—it’ll take longer to get back to you, but the accuracy should be better than anything powered by artificial intelligence… at least for the time being.

With the blink of an eye, Google’s Pixel 4 accomplishes something that no other significant Android phone-maker has. It finally caught up to iPhone’s Face ID — a biometric unlocking feature that Apple popularized two years ago — to unlock the phone and buy things with a scan of your face. Now that a secure version exists in Android phones, face unlock will be the killer feature every Android user will want. 

The face unlock feature on Android phones has existed for years, but mostly as a convenience that’s been flimsy enough to fool with photos. Face ID’s more rigorous process meant it was secure enough for transactions. 

Some Huawei phones, like the Huawei Mate 30 Pro, use the same technology as Apple to unlock the phone, but they don’t support mobile payments. This year, Samsung killed its iris scanning after three years. That left Apple as the only real game in town.

With consumers more aware of the value of their privacy, being able to offer secure face unlock is potentially even more convenient than scanning your fingerprint or entering a pin code. Closing the gap with Face ID also gives Google an edge over Samsung, LG, Huawei and all the rest at a time when Google can sell its phones across all major US carriers, providing an opportunity to make the Pixel, which hasn’t historically sold well, more of a household name.

But more importantly, the Pixel 4’s adoption of this secure version of face unlock could have ripple effects throughout the rest of the Android world. If Google folds the blueprint for this secure version of face unlock into the Android OS, it will all but guarantee that every midrange and premium phone will use the feature, since roughly 90% of all smartphones run on the platform. 

Why face unlock matters

Face scanning, along with fingerprint scanning, is one of the few biometrically secure methods of verifying your identity. On a phone, it’s meant to be a fast, convenient and mostly hands-free alternative to fingerprint readers. Using face unlock instead of a fingerprint reader can free up space on the screen and keep you from fumbling on the back or side of the phone to unlock it.

Proponents of face unlock also claim that it’s more secure than fingerprint readers and harder to fool with images and synthetic appendages, like dummy fingers. It has the power to authenticate password autofill in addition to mobile payments.

The technology works by scanning your features and creating a stored image that the phone then compares to your face whenever you attempt to unlock your device. Versions that are less secure create optical images with the camera, which are easy enough to fool with photos, masks or other spoofs. 

Apple, and now Google, uses an infrared sensor to project tens of thousands of dots onto your face. This creates a 3D depth map with far more data on the length, shape, span and width of your unique features.

While the iPhone requires you to swipe up from the bottom of the screen to finish unlocking the phone (after it’s verified your identity), the Pixel 4 uses Motion Sense, a collection of motion-sensing features that are driven by radar to recognize when you’re reaching for your device. That alone will trigger the Pixel 4 to unlock the screen. 

Using gestures and a glance to unlock the phone should be faster than swiping it — at least, according to Google. This is something we’ll test soon.

Why only now?

It isn’t clear why the Android competition has lagged so far behind when it comes to truly secure face unlock. Qualcomm bundled support for a 50,000-dot projector into its Snapdragon 845 chipset a year after the iPhone X launched in 2017, but rivals were slow to take up the technology.

Perhaps some of these device-makers lacked the technology or software teams to get the feature secure enough, or perhaps they wanted to put their own spin on the secure face unlock realm, as Google has now done.

Either way, Google’s opportunity to innovate on hardware by pairing Motion Sense gestures to the face unlock mechanism isn’t just a long-overdue way for the brand to flex its technical muscle. And it isn’t just a way for Pixel phones to race ahead. Because of Google’s considerable resources and reach, its blueprint for face unlock on Android phones has the potential to push biometrics even further into the future.