Google is working on a super-charged screen recorder for Chrome OS

Google Chrome OS has offered a built-in screen recorder for a while now, but it’s fairly basic. You can switch between recording the entire screen, a partial screen, or a window, but there are no options or features beyond that. Thankfully, it seems like Google is working on a completely new screen recorder with more features.

Chrome Story spotted a new app in the Chrome OS Canary channel called ‘Projector,’ which appears to be a mix between a screen recorder and the Google Recorder app on Android. It’s not actually functional yet, but the setup screens reveal some of the upcoming features.

There will be an option to include your own camera in the corner of the recording (similar to the screen recorder on Samsung One UI and other Android skins), and the app will generate a searchable transcript of your speech. Projector will also apparently save recordings to Google Drive — hopefully saving to local storage will still be an option, because screen recording files can take up an awful lot of storage, especially full-resolution recordings on large screens.

The new application seems like it’s built primarily for use in education, where it could be helpful to teachers recording lectures or tutorials, or students recording remote presentations (with a slideshow running full-screen, for example). Some of the apps created for Chrome OS also work on other platforms, such as the new Calculator, but it’s not clear if Projector will be functional outside of Chromebooks.

There are three flags in chrome://flags currently required to see the Projector app: Enable Projector, Enable Projector annotator, and Enable Projector exclude transcript feature. Those flags are also still only present in the Canary builds of Chrome OS, but they should trickle down to the Dev and Beta channels over the next few weeks.