The Plaud.AI pin took up mercifully little space in my carry-on. It also presented an opportunity to kill two birds: I was flying across the country and knew I would be taking copious notes.
If you’ve been in a meeting with me, you know I bring my laptop without fail. My dumb brain needs to take notes. That said, the process of typing while listening can be as distracting as it is engaging. At the very least, it stands between you and a natural conversation, especially in those moments when you’re still typing after the other person has finished talking.
Sure, you could try to type faster or find a shorthand, but I’ve found that both of these methods have a tendency to render text unreadable. The next obvious step is recording — with the other person’s permission, of course. Back when I was a cub reporter, standalone digital voice recorders were still a going concern.
These days, I record on my laptop or place my phone down on the table between myself and the subject. These devices present their own issues, like a lack of proper microphones and the tendency to pick up typing noises when doing double duty. I find myself harboring some light nostalgia for the days of my little Olympus recorder with its built-in USB-A dongle.
Plaud.AI’s raison d’être lives somewhere among the above scenarios. Earlier this year, the startup launched Plaud Note, a recording device that magnetically snaps to the back of a handset, utilizing ChatGPT to transcribe conversations. While I didn’t have the opportunity to try out that earlier device, I jumped when the company told me about the upcoming NotePin.
I’m skeptical that the product has a large target audience in the days of do-everything smartphones, but I was sure that I was part of it. Sometimes it feels like I take notes for the sole purpose of having something to do in meetings. I say this because many of my notes just languish, due to an inability to find pertinent information or just general unreadability.
Otter.AI has helped a lot on both fronts when I upload recordings to the AI-based transcription service. Plaud’s process is similar, but more streamlined. In the case of NotePin, you wear it on your wrist or magnetically snapped to your lapel, tap once to record, and tap again to stop. The recordings are saved on your phone in real time, and from there you can decide whether to upload them for transcription, depending on how robust a monthly subscription you have.
The $169 device comes with 300 free monthly transcription minutes. A Pro plan, meanwhile, is $6.60 a month, quadrupling the transcription minutes and adding a few features like custom templates and “Ask AI,” which the company describes as “an AI Agent to extract more information from recordings, information that was not discovered through summary templates, and information that spans multiple recordings.”
Ultimately, however, whether you opt in to a Pro account comes down to how much time you spend in meetings per month. Given that most of my meetings are via teleconference, I don’t suspect I’ll upgrade. Who knows, though: Maybe the millions of briefings I take at CES in January will force my hand.
One thing I really appreciate with Plaud is the company’s deliberate design. The concept of life-logging was a bust. I suspect this is due in large part to the fact that most people don’t want to record all of their daily comings and goings. And the people they encounter generally don’t want to be recorded.
The NotePin is deliberate in the sense that you tap it to trigger it. It’s an intentional action that’s likely to be noticed by the person sitting across from you. When recording starts, you feel a quick haptic buzz. If that’s not enough to allay your fears, you can open the Plaud app on your phone to see if it’s actually recording. When you’re done, another tap gives you a haptic buzz to signal that the recording has stopped.
GPT does a good job with the transcriptions and summaries. There’s a mind-mapping tool as well, though I didn’t find that to be especially engaging. Speakers are separated by voice, and the system is capable of managing multiple speakers in 59 languages. The text is clean, the interface is easy to use, and the summaries are useful. It’s also dead simple to share a link to the audio with a colleague.
My biggest issue presently, as a longtime Otter user, is the inability to tap on words in the transcription to play back the corresponding audio. I suspect it’s something Plaud is planning to add, if the company hasn’t already.
Unlike other AI pins, Plaud’s product feels like a solution to real issues. These are issues I deal with all the time as a journalist. My biggest question at the moment is whether there are enough people in the world like me to sustain Plaud’s business model.