Key Takeaways
- The Plaud NotePin records, transcribes, and summarizes audio recordings of meetings and events using AI.
- The wearable’s design is elegant and discrete, with an easy-to-use app for customizing transcripts and summaries.
- Battery life on the device lasts for days, but the subscription cost may be a barrier for some users.
Their shapes and sizes vary, but most AI hardware boils down to a microphone and a chatbot. Companies like Rabbit and Humane have taken that concept (with tweaks) to their strained, computer-replacing conclusion. You can do a lot of the same things a smartphone can do with this setup, but the results get lackluster fast.
Plaud’s approach is much more reserved. The Plaud NotePin is a similar pairing of a portable microphone and a large language model (LLM), but focused, as its name suggests, on notes. You can use the NotePin to record and transcribe meetings, lectures, and interviews and provide summaries and notes of everything you’ve heard. At $169 with an optional $155 per year subscription, it can be an expensive package, but I do think there’s a case for buying one, at least for some people.
Recommended
Plaud NotePin
Plaud’s NotePin is an AI-powered wearable that lets you record, transcribe, and summarize audio into a wide variety of different formats. With a built-in Ask AI tool, you can also ask an AI assistant about things you’ve discussed in your recordings.
- Design is stylish, but discrete
- Battery life last a long time
- Easy to use
- Plaud app offers a variety of ways to generate notes
- AI subscription is expensive
- Your phone can do nearly everything the NotePin can
- No physical buttons
Related
How we test and review products at Pocket-lint
We don’t do arm-chair research. We buy and test our own products, and we only publish buyer’s guides with products we’ve actually reviewed.
Price, availability, specs
The Plaud NotePin was first released in September 2024 for $169. For that current price — the “early bird bundle” — you’ll get the NotePin in a variety of metallic finishes (Cosmic Gray, Lunar Silver, and Sunset Purple) and $45 worth of accessories, including a clip, necklace, and wristband. You can’t get any of that on-demand, however. The NotePin is currently being sold in batches and currently, if you order a new NotePin, it will ship in December.
The pin itself is small, only weighing 0.8oz (25g), with a 270mAh battery, and 64GB of storage. There are two tiny, highly-sensitive microphones built-in to the NotePin itself. The NotePin works without a subscription, but in order to maximize the amount of audio you can transcribe and access extra AI tools, you’ll have to pay for a subscription. An annual Plaud AI subscription normally costs $155 per year but has gone on sale for as low as $79 per year, which translates to around $6.60 per month. Read on for whether that subscription is worth paying for, and for more details about the NotePin itself, check out the spec table below.
What I liked about the Plaud NotePin
The design is elegant and discrete
You might not immediately notice someone wearing a Plaud NotePin. That’s one of the strengths of the wearable. If anything, its pill-shaped design feels sort of ideal. The NotePin isn’t that much longer or thicker than an Apple Watch, and its smooth aluminum exterior and removable magnetic back is simple in how featureless it is. There isn’t even a button to start or stop a recording. You just press on the outside of the NotePin until it vibrates once to signal that the recording has started (a small LED in the Plaud logo lights up, too). Holding it again until you’ve felt two vibrations will let you know that it’s stopped recording.
You might not immediately notice someone wearing a Plaud NotePin.
More than anything, the Plaud NotePin looks like a boring broach. It’s generic enough to fit on a wristband, necklace, or clip without looking too out of place. In my experience, it’s very easy to wear without distracting the people you’re recording, especially if you use the wristband attachment, which fades into the background like a smartwatch does. The NotePin design makes it less capable of recording phone calls unless they’re on speaker, something the original Plaud Note was specifically designed to do by being attached to the back of your phone, but the rest of the benefits outweigh any drawbacks in my opinion.
The Plaud app makes transcription and summaries easy to customize
When you first set up the NotePin you’ll have to connect it to the Plaud app. This syncing and “binding” process is a little bit cumbersome the first time you do it, but it’s worked flawlessly since then. Three or so seconds after I open the app, it immediately starts transferring over the most recent recordings. The transfer process is pretty simple and generating a transcript or summary doesn’t take that much more than a minute or two. In my opinion, though, the best part of the Plaud app is what you can do with your transcript after the fact.
There’s a surprising number of ways Plaud can summarize and create notes out of your transcriptions. There are templates for meeting notes with key takeaways and action items, interview templates with a Q & A structure, and even a template for job applicant interviews. On its own, the app is pretty good at identifying speakers in a recording and breaking up the transcript into logical paragraphs. What’s nice, though, is that as soon as you label a speaker, the notes the app generated will update accordingly. As you add speakers, recordings, and transcripts, Plaud will attempt to identify speakers based on their voice too, something the app was pretty successful at in my experience.
The Plaud app can do even more. If you’re looking for something more specific than what Plaud offers, you can write an AI prompt to create a note or summary in your specific desired format. Any transcript you’ve taken can also be searched, using a feature called Ask AI that lets you ask questions about your recording and receive relevant answers in natural language. A device that mostly relies on software to work needs a good app, and the Plaud app is one. It’s not flashy, but it’s very capable.
Related
Apple Voice Memos vs Google Recorder: Which is better at transcription?
Both iPhones and Pixel phones come preloaded with a way to record and transcribe audio on the go, but only one does it best.
The NotePin battery life lasts for days
Plaud claims that the 270 mAh battery in the NotePin can be stretched to 40 days of standby battery and 20 hours of continuous recording. That sounds ambitious, but it seems to at least line up with what I experienced. I’ve been able to use the NotePin for five days in a row for around 30 minutes at a time, and only made it to around 50% battery.
It seems like you could pretty easily get through a week of work without problems, recording a few hours at a time. That makes the Plaud NotePin a great option for university students. Battery life is impacted when you have actually to transfer files from the NotePin to the Plaud app, but otherwise, the battery should last long enough for the working professionals Plaud designed the device for. Even if you do run out of battery, it doesn’t take that long to charge the NotePin either.
What I didn’t like about the Plaud NotePin
I only have so much room in my life for subscription hardware.
Just for owning the Plaud NotePin and using the Plaud app, you get “300 monthly transcription minutes,” unlimited cloud storage, and features like speaker labeling, a selection of note templates, and the ability to import and export audio and export transcripts and notes in a variety of formats. You don’t get the Ask AI feature, which lets you ask questions about the contents of your recordings, the ability to create custom note templates, or 1,200 minutes of transcription time. That might matter to everyone, but if you plan on recording a lot, or you want to use two of the more useful features in the Plaud app, you’re going to have to pay for a subscription. $155 per year is not a small amount of money. If you get the Plaud subscription at a discount, you’re locked into a lower price, but it’s unclear how long Plaud will offer that deal.
The problem with a dedicated, mostly single-use device like the Plaud NotePin is that even its $169 could be called into question when both the Pixel and iPhone now offer free ways to record and transcribe audio on your phone. Free is usually more convenient than any fee. Do you really need a dedicated recorder when you have your phone? I can think of moments where taking a quick recording might only be possible with a device you’re wearing rather than one you normally keep in your pocket. While driving to work, for example. There are also times when it might be more natural to just start recording from your wrist or shirt rather than pulling out a phone or tablet. But whether that’s enough for you depends on how you plan to use the Plaud NotePin.
Should you buy the Plaud NotePin?
Elegant design and reliable, straightforward features might not be enough
If you don’t already have a free way to record audio, a Plaud NotePin is a potentially expensive solution that works surprisingly well. If you do have a free way to record audio, then you need to decide if you’re ready to commit yourself to audio notes to help justify the extra fee, and a subscription.
You should also decide if you’re comfortable paying for a version of ChatGPT or Claude that can only generate transcripts and create summaries because, on some level, that’s what buying into Plaud is. I like it and can see myself using it, but I think many people will be more practical and thrifty than me.
This device was provided to Pocket-lint by Plaud.
Recommended
Plaud NotePin
Plaud’s NotePin is an AI-powered wearable that lets you record, transcribe, and summarize audio into a wide variety of different formats. With a built-in Ask AI tool, you can also ask an AI assistant about things you’ve discussed in your recordings.
