Beloved by journalists, musicians, and audio recordists alike, one of the best voice recording apps is already included with your iOS device—featuring a clean UI and basic audio editing tools.
Advanced audio transcription
Very limited device support
Limited audio format support
No editing tools
The Bottom Line.Google has packaged everything its learned in AI development into a voice recording app that's easy to use and powerful.
Rev Voice RecorderAudio transcription service
Transcriptions aren't free
No editing tools
The Bottom Line.If you want to avoid the hassle of self-transcribing your audio notes, Rev offers reliable audio transcriptions with a quick turnaround time and cost-effective pricing scheme.
Smart RecorderLive audio spectrum analyzer
2GB recording limit
No editing tools
The Bottom Line.Smart Recorder is a voice recording app that lets you take control of your sound with advanced input settings and high-quality codec support, all from the comfort of your mobile device.
Voice recording apps are convenient for quickly taking notes, or jotting down ideas without having to hold a pen to paper. Whether you’re a journalist in an interview, a singer-songwriter demoing new song ideas, or a student planning to record an hour-long lecture, you’ll want to use an app that is easy to use and provides you with enough control over your recordings.
Editor’s note: this article was updated on June 6, 2023, to highlight Apple GarageBand as an alternative to conventional voice recording apps.
Among all the voice recording apps available for Android, Digipom’s Easy Voice Recorder is considered to be the most popular.
Easy Voice Recorder
Easy Voice Recorder has a clean and straightforward interface that makes creating, organizing, and sharing your recordings a seamless experience. The app also utilizes 16-bit PCM and MP4 audio codecs for high quality recording and playback. Additional features that make this app an Android favorite include the lack of software recording limitations and support for Android Wear OS (formerly Android Wear), enabling voice recordings from a smart watch.
One drawback to the app is its exclusion of convenience-oriented features, which are only included in the Pro version. These features include clip trimming/editing, MP3 and AAC codec support, Bluetooth microphone support, skip silence, custom bitrate selection, and automatic cloud storage uploading (to Google Drive or Dropbox). Fortunately, the upgrade only requires a one-time payment of $4.99—about the price of a latte.
Voice Memos is a free voice recording app used by many — from students to singer-songwriters. Besides recording voices, the app is often used by artists to spontaneously record audio samples and song demos. The popularity of Voice Memos lies in its simple design, which is a signature of Apple software.
Voice Memos
Upon opening the app, a bright red record button lies at the bottom of the screen, allowing you to start recording instantly, with added timecode and waveform readouts. The app also includes a trim function for basic audio editing. When you’re done recording and editing, the file is saved locally to your drive, and is automatically synced across your Apple devices via iCloud. File transfers between other Apple devices are also instantaneous thanks to the company’s proprietary AirDrop file sharing feature.
While editing your recordings, you can enhance your audio with the tap of a button. The feature works by using machine learning to identify and filter out unwanted sounds, such as background hums and echoes. While it won’t magically transform your smartphone microphone into a $3,000 vintage mic, the enhanced recording feature allows you to better hear your subject.
Unfortunately, Voice Memos does possess some limitations. The most obvious drawback is that this app is only available on iOS devices. Moreover, Voice Memos has limited compression codec support, using MPEG-4 for recording, and either Apple’s AAC (Advanced Audio Codec) or ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) for compression.
Over the years, Google has made leaps and bounds in the realm of artificial intelligence. Recorder is the company’s free voice recording app that automates the process of transcribing audio, rendering human transcription services a thing of the past.
The Recorder app goes above and beyond merely transcribing people’s speech, with the ability to recognize other sounds such as music, applauding, and even animal noises. Because of this automated transcription process, you now have the ability to search for recordings based on what’s been said, rather than just looking up clip titles. Amazingly, audio transcriptions are done locally on the device, rather than online with a constant Internet connection. Plus, with an update released in late October 2022, the Recorder app now gives you basic audio editing functions—including trimming audio based on text transcribed by the app.
Because this type of app is still maturing, there are a few caveats. For starters, the app is only officially supported on select Google Pixel devices. However, some people have found ways to run the app on unsupported devices. Other limitations include English-only language support, and limited codec support (AAC only).
Featuring a clean UI and relatively cost-effective pricing scheme, the Rev Voice Recorder app is meant for people who are willing to pay for reliable audio transcriptions.
