I've been using Nothing's new Audio Snapshots to troll my friends

If your group chat is anything like mine, it’s full of funny-to-unflattering photos of friends turned into custom stickers, which are used to tease and haunt them forever. Well, Nothing’s new Ear (3a) earbuds just gave me the audio version of that. A feature called Audio Snapshot lets you pinch both buds at once to save a clip of whatever audio is playing through them — a podcast, a lecture, or, more dangerously, a voice note from a friend. It even captures up to 30 seconds before you pinch, so when someone says something truly unhinged, you don’t need to have seen it coming: It’s already saved before I stop laughing.

The clips sync to the Nothing X app, where you can replay, trim, share, and transcribe them. The marketing materials suggested you could also turn transcript lines into shareable “quote cards,” but I wasn’t able to find that option anywhere in the app, even on the Pro transcription tier, so perhaps it will come with a future firmware update or is limited to Nothing devices. As it stands, raw audio WAV files are the only way to share recordings.

A lot of my group chats are full of voice memos. Most of the time, it’s just easier to send 30 seconds of rambling than to type it out while you’re walking somewhere. For instance, a friend of mine walked out of Nolan’s The Odyssey and immediately sent a voice note practically vibrating with excitement, which would have been extremely hard to translate into text. Lucky for me, I pinched and saved the clip, and now, his screams of joy get replayed in the group chat any time someone’s even mildly excited about anything — a new gig, grabbing beers, a sports game — we all hear Jack scream “Let’s goooo!”

The buds have basically turned into an audio archive at this point. One friend still has the same voicemail greeting from high school. Of course, I grabbed a recording of that, and we now play it whenever he takes forever to respond to messages, and we have a laugh at how much younger he sounds when he’s away from his phone.

Live calls work too, via a separate call-recording feature triggered by the same pinch. But there’s a catch: it announces itself. Both people on the call hear a notification, and the recording only starts after the chime finishes. Initially, I was a bit disappointed that it announced itself, but honestly, it became even funnier later on as a mind of open threat. Mid-call, my friends would hear the chime and immediately start censoring themselves, choosing their words carefully, or stop talking altogether. And honestly, that’s kind of the point — the app makes you “agree” to guidelines on notifying participants and complying with local recording laws before you can even use the feature. Sure, it’s just a loose handshake agreement to be respectful and cover Nothing legally, but yeah, recording people or strangers without their consent isn’t cool.

Audio Snapshots only capture audio playing through the earbuds — they’re not an open mic you can hold in the room, so your friends’ in-person chaos remains legally unpreserved. The rewind buffer also drains extra battery, and it doesn’t work when LDAC’s high-quality Bluetooth mode is enabled. But the buds do hold about two hours of recordings before you need to sync, which is more than enough to make a quick meme. Transcription runs offline by default, and in my testing, it’s accurate — it gets the words right, slang and all.

All in all, it’s a pretty unique and fun feature that none of my friends saw coming, given that no other mainstream earbuds can do this. Of course, you could be more practical or productive with it than I, like saving an important tidbit from a lecture at school, or a reminder to grab something from the store before your mom asks where it is. But personally, I can’t help but capture the silly voices and outbursts from my friends and use it against them unexpectedly, dragging up an old voice note the moment they least expect it.