Plaud's $169 ChatGPT-powered NotePin has a permanent place in my travel bag
The $169 Plaud NotePin is a tiny magnetic recording device. Recordings are transcribed and AI provide summaries of meetings.
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 amon
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.
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