Record, play back, save as MP3 or WAV
Recording needs access to your microphone. Your browser will ask for permission — the audio stays on your device and is never sent anywhere.
A quick voice recording is often the fastest way to capture something: a thought before it slips away, a lecture, an interview, a pronunciation you want to check, or a message that would take five minutes to type. For decades that meant carrying a dedicated dictaphone; today any device with a microphone and a browser can do the same job, and the result is a file you can play, send or archive immediately.
Speech is far less demanding than music. The human voice lives mostly between 300 and 3400 Hz — the range telephone systems have used for a century — so a single mono channel at a modest bitrate captures it cleanly, while a stereo pair would only double the size without adding anything useful. That is why voice memos stay small: a moderate MP3 bitrate keeps an hour of speech comfortably under a hundred megabytes, and lossless WAV is worth choosing only when the recording will be edited, transcribed by software, or archived as a master copy.
A few habits make a big difference to the result. Get close to the microphone — halving the distance matters more than any setting — and record away from fans, traffic and open windows, because background noise is much harder to remove afterwards than to avoid in the first place. Speak at a steady level rather than loudly, watch that the level meter moves without slamming into the top, and remember that most jurisdictions expect everyone involved to know when a conversation is being recorded.