Plaud AI Note and NotePin: AI That Works, But Convergence is Coming
Is there still a place for single-purpose gadgets? Are there any AI wearables that aren't toys (Rabbit R1) or disasters (Hu.man.e)? I have been testing Plaud AI’s Note and NotePin voice recorders that feature gorgeous hardware, well-designed software, and AI that works remarkably well. My conclusion: these are worth paying for, though you will definitely pay for them, and the market window for a dedicated transcription device appears to be fairly narrow.
The Plaud Note is an almost comically thin credit card with a MagSafe wallet case, while the NotePin is a dense pill that can be attached to clothes or worn on your wrist or a lanyard. Using either one is dead simple: you push the button and it records; push it again and it stops. While the button on the NotePin is hidden, there is haptic feedback on both models that let you know you did it right, and a small red LED lights up. The Note also has a separate mode for recording phone calls using a separate vibration-sensing microphone when magnetically attached to a phone in the included case. This only works if you use the phone’s speaker and earpiece, not Bluetooth headsets or smartglasses, so I didn’t personally find it useful, but for some users, this feature alone will justify its purchase.
When you're done recording, the app automatically downloads the recording to your phone, and with one tap it is processed in the cloud. The AI actually works! It's kind of mind blowing how well it could take a rambling conversation I had, outdoors, in the swirling wind, with a robotics CEO and turn it into a complete briefing summary. Accuracy was extremely high, and the utility was incredible. I have used it multiple times since and it's been incredible to grab a snippet of a briefing and paste into a report.
The hardware costs $159 for the Note or $169 for the NotePin; a full suite of accessories is included in that price. The service is free for up to 300 minutes of transcription per month, $6.60/month for up to 1,200 minutes per month, and $19.99/month for unlimited use. Paid subscriptions have more AI options, including the ability to query the results. These fees are not trivial; realistically, if you actually use the Note or NotePin enough to justify its purchase, you will also likely want to pay for a subscription.
The challenge to Pluad is that this could be an app. Indeed, Google and Samsung can do this on their flagship phones today, with a little less flexibility and an extra step or two, depending on your choice of apps. It is not hard to predict that AI voice transcription will soon become a checkbox feature for literally every device with a microphone: your phone, earbuds, smartwatch, and smartglasses. Videoconferencing apps are already building this into their services. Plaud’s secret sauce isn’t all that secret – it really is just a hardware wrapper for existing LLMs (ChatGPT 4o, Claude 3.5, and o3-mini; the details are mostly hidden from the user experience). Plaud is charging for access to AI beyond casual use because it costs Plaud money to use the LLMs it does. However, for advanced users who already have a subscription to AI services, this is unnecessary duplication.
Plaud isn’t doing any of the processing on-device, so you have the same cloud privacy and security issues as any other AI processing. It would certainly be possible to choose a chipset with an NPU large enough to run small LLMs on-device, but you would essentially be building a high-end smartphone, and priced accordingly.
So this will eventually be subsumed by apps built into devices you will purchase for other reasons, the AI doesn't run on Plaud’s devices, and there's a non-trivial subscription fee. These are also beautifully designed objects that do something useful with no added friction to the experience. For now, it's an easy recommendation mainstream users who value simplicity and utility enough to pay for it. But the market window for this product is closing.
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