Gemini Notebook can now record your meetings, but there’s a catch

You can use the tool to record up to one hour of live audio right from your Android or iPhone. This is a great way to directly capture lectures, team meetings, or your brainstorming sessions, which you can then use as sources in the future.

The feature already appears live for all iOS and Android users worldwide. You should see a new microphone icon on the Gemini Notebook homepage or in the Sources tab of a notebook.

As soon as you stop a recording, Gemini Notebook will upload the audio for processing and generate a transcript. This can take a while, and in my case, the upload kept failing initially. If you press the microphone shortcut from the Gemini Notebook home screen, it will create a new notebook with that recording as a source.

The good thing is that you don’t necessarily need to keep the Gemini Notebook running in the foreground to record audio. The app can continue capturing audio in the background, even when your phone is locked.

A handy recorder with a big catch

Admittedly, if you have a Pixel and use the Pixel recorder to capture the audio of your meetings or lectures, stick to it. Gemini Notebook’s audio recording tool is basic and proved unreliable in my testing.

With Pixel Recorder, you can also share the audio clip with your friends, family, or colleagues, which is not possible with audio recordings captured using the Gemini Notebook mobile app. That’s because the Gemini Notebook discards the original voice recording after generating the transcript.

There are some benefits to using the recorder in the Gemini Notebook app. You can directly summarize the audio, pull out main takeaways, or get answers about specific topics. Plus, you can keep the transcript alongside other relevant sources in the same notebook.

However, this convenience only goes so far if you also need the original audio file. You’ll have to rely on the transcript, with no saved recording to check if it gets something wrong.

For quick thoughts or brainstorming sessions, such a trade-off might be easy to accept. But for an important interview or meeting, using the Pixel Recorder, or any other recorder with similar functionality, will be a safer bet.