Gemini Nano feature drives 24% increase in engagement for Pixel Recorder app

Google's Pixel Recorder app, known for its voice memo capabilities, is primarily used for short memos despite its potential for recording meetings and lectures.

However, people are using the Recorder app more and more these days, since the app's developers turned to Gemini Nano, which is a powerful on-device large language model (LLM). This integration introduces an AI-powered audio summarization feature to help users more easily find the right recordings and quickly grasp key points.

Earlier this month, Gemini Nano received an upgrade with the introduction of the new Multimodality model. The Recorder app is already taking advantage of this enhancement to better summarize longer voice recordings, offering improved processing for grammar and nuance.

Recorder users are now using the new AI-powered summarization feature an average of 2 to 5 times per day, resulting in a 24% increase in the total number of saved recordings. This feature has significantly boosted app engagement and user retention. The Recorder team also reported that feedback on the new feature has been positive, with many users appreciating the time it saves them.

Recorder developers initially explored a cloud-based solution, achieving high performance and quality. However, to enhance accessibility and privacy for users, they opted for an on-device approach. The development of Gemini Nano provided an ideal opportunity to create concise audio summaries while ensuring data processing remains on the device.


To improve results, Recorder fine-tuned the model with data specific to its use case, utilizing low-order rank adaptation (LoRA). This allows Gemini Nano to consistently generate three-bullet point summaries of transcripts, including speaker names, key takeaways, and themes.

Recorder developers have integrated the latest Gemini Nano model, known as Gemini Nano with Multimodality, to enhance its summarization feature on Pixel 9 devices. This new model, larger and more advanced than its predecessor on Pixel 8 devices, offers improved capability, accuracy, and scalability. It also supports a greater number of tokens, allowing Recorder to summarize much longer transcripts than before. Currently, Gemini Nano with Multimodality is available exclusively on Pixel 9 devices.

To fully utilize the new model’s features, Recorder developers expanded their dataset to include longer voice recordings, refined their evaluation methods, and established launch criteria metrics focused on grammar and nuance.

Does this make you want to switch to the Pixel 9?