OnePlus phones are lauded for their extreme durability, fantastic battery life, and ultra-fast charging, along with an overall intuitive experience. There are tons of OS features that you can leverage for both productivity and fun, like Plus Mind for saving on-screen content in a digital vault, AI Writer, and lots of photo editing tools. But there’s one lesser-known feature worth using that you probably haven’t even tried: AI Recorder.
Similar to Pixel Recorder, you can record conversations, conferences, and even personal notes, then get real-time or post-transcription and AI-powered summaries. I have used it in so many scenarios, and it works wonderfully.
How I use OnePlus AI Recorder
As a journalist, I conduct phone and in-person interviews, and the OnePlus AI Recorder features available on the OnePlus 13, OnePlus 13R, OnePlus 15, and OnePlus 15R have come in handy in both scenarios. In person, I set up my camera and the OnePlus 15 to record the audio alongside camera capture. For phone calls, I use my laptop with a Zoom or Google Meet call or a second phone while recording from the OnePlus device.
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I have also used it to record presentations and conferences. I attended an AI conference in Spain, for example, and set the phone beside me to record multiple days of a series of 30-minute-to-one-hour presentations. I could start and stop for each one, name the file, then move on to the next. I did the same for a presentation at my son’s upcoming high school. Despite sitting several rows back, the audio was picked up crisply and clearly.
But my favorite feature is instant and post-recording AI transcription. You can get a full transcription of any audio recording in real-time or within minutes after. I used this for the aforementioned conference recordings, compiling everything into a Word document I could scan to search for quotes for my article.
I did the same after an interview, fine-tuning the AI transcription and correcting minor mistakes before publishing the Q&A. This is a great feature for briefings, meetings, and even brainstorming sessions among students or work teams as well. Generate an AI transcription, and you don’t have to worry about taking notes.
Tips for using OnePlus AI Recorder
Keep in mind that when there are multiple speakers, OnePlus AI Recorder doesn’t always get it right, sometimes labeling the same person as Speaker 1 and Speaker 2, for example. However, when the voices are distinct and captured accurately, you can display the text transcription for a single speaker rather than the entire conversation. This could be useful for group projects, even employee or student evaluations.
Seeing the real-time transcription on screen as you play back a recording makes it easy to follow along, ensure accuracy, and pinpoint key moments. It’s so much easier than scrubbing through a recording’s timeline with a slider to find the moment you want.
Summary, which extracts key moments, works well, but might miss key facts. However, it’s great for meeting notes and brainstorming sessions. For an interview I did with a Samsung executive, he provided an outline of key points to answer, removing all the extraneous information. I still worked from the raw version of the transcript for publishing the Q&A, but this was a nice overview of the key points to which he spoke.
By comparison, Pixel Recorder can create AI summaries using Gemini as well, and they’re far more succinct but also risk losing some of the flavor you might want. I would rather have a longer summary that I can edit down than a shorter one that’s missing key details.
For example, when summarizing a recording of me reading segments of my OnePlus 15 review, Pixel Recorder left out key elements, such as mentions of my user experience and the overall summation at the end. By contrast, OnePlus Recorder captured everything, complete with subheads and point-form notes.
Longer recordings can naturally take longer to generate transcripts, and sometimes, it will time out, and you have to start over. But I was able to transcribe an entire series of sessions, some as long as 2.5 hours.
You can rename recordings manually or intelligently. I tried this by recording my voice reading the intro to this article. The name it provided after translation was “OnePlus AI Recorder: a Powerful, Overlooked Feature,” which is pretty spot-on. For the Samsung Q&A, it named the recording “Samsung’s Vision for Smartphone Innovation and AI.” This makes organization effortless, especially if you’re taking multiple recordings one after another and don’t want to have to go back and organize everything after the fact.
OnePlus Recorder is among the best
Yes, OnePlus isn’t the only phone manufacturer to offer an AI Recorder, but I have found it to be extremely effective and reliable, just one reason that its phones rank among the best Android phones. Pixel Recorder can achieve most of the same tasks, but OnePlus offers a cleaner organization of the conversations, breaking them up into digestible sections versus larger blocks of text. I also find the summaries to be more detailed without being bloated.
Even if I’m not using the OnePlus 15 as my primary phone, I always bring it along to work events and have it at my side for interviews or meetings for the purpose of using this single app. It’s the perfect example of a way that AI can assist in productivity without replacing creativity.
AI features save time
The OnePlus 15 is one of the best Android phones you can buy right now with plenty of power, extreme durability, long battery life, and exciting AI features like Plus Mind. But one of the most underrated in my opinion is the AI Recorder capabilities, with the AI Recorder app being one worth checking out if you haven’t already.
