The Proud.AI Pin thankfully took up very little space in my carry-on luggage, and it also offered an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: I was flying around the country and knew I'd be taking a ton of notes.
If you've ever been in a meeting with me, you know I always bring my laptop. I'm a slow thinker and I need to take notes. But typing while listening can be both engaging and distracting, or at the very least, it can interfere with a natural conversation, especially if you're still typing after the other person has finished speaking.
Of course, you could type faster or find a shorthand, but I found that either approach tended to make the text less legible. The next obvious step would be to record it, after getting permission, of course. When I was a rookie reporter, standalone digital voice recorders were still around.
These days I record on my laptop, or with my phone on the table between me and my subject. These devices have their own issues, like not having a proper microphone, or picking up typing noises when dual-purposed, etc. I fondly remember the days of those little Olympus recorders with built-in USB-A dongles.
Plaud.AI exists somewhere in this scenario. Earlier this year, the startup launched Proud Note, a recording device that magnetically attaches to the back of your phone and uses ChatGPT to transcribe conversations. I didn't have a chance to try out that earlier device, but when I heard about the company's upcoming NotePin, I jumped at the chance.
Image credit: Brian Heater
In this age of all-powerful smartphones, I doubt that this product has a large target user base, but I'm certainly part of it. Sometimes I feel like I'm taking notes just to get something done in a meeting, as many of my notes end up just sitting there because the right information can't be found or they're just generally difficult to read.
Otter.AI helps a lot on both fronts when it comes to uploading recordings to AI-based transcription services. Plaud's process is similar but more streamlined; with NotePin, you wear it on your wrist or clip it to your collar with a magnet, tap once to record, and tap again to stop. Your recordings are stored on your phone in real time, and from there, you can decide whether or not to upload them for transcription, depending on the strength of your monthly subscription.
The $169 device comes with 300 minutes of transcription for free each month, while the Pro plan costs $6.60 per month and offers four times the transcription time and adds features like custom templates and “Ask AI,” which the company describes as “an AI agent that extracts more information from your recordings, information not found in summary templates, and information across multiple recordings.”
But ultimately, whether or not I choose a Pro account will depend on how many hours per month I spend in meetings. Most of my meetings are conference calls, so I don't think I'll upgrade. But the millions of briefings I'll get to at CES in January may sway me.
What I really appreciate about Plaud is the company's intentional design. The concept of life logging has failed, and I think this is largely due to the fact that most people don't want to record everything they do every day, and the people they meet generally don't want to be recorded either.
NotePin is intentional in the sense that you tap to wake it up. It's an intentional action, and one that's likely to be noticed by the person sitting opposite you. Once recording begins, you'll immediately feel a haptic vibration. If that's not enough to ease your anxiety, you can open the Plaud app on your phone to check if it's actually recording. Once you're done recording, tap again and you'll hear a haptic vibration to indicate that recording has stopped.
Image credit: Brian Heater
GPT does a good job of transcription and summarization. There is also a mind mapping tool, but I didn't find it particularly appealing. Speakers are differentiated by audio, and the system can manage multiple speakers in 59 languages. The text is easy to understand, the interface is easy to use, and the summaries are useful. Sharing links to audio with colleagues is also very easy.
As a longtime Otter user, my biggest issue at the moment is the inability to tap on a word in the transcript to play the corresponding audio, so I suspect this is something Plaud plans to add if they haven't already.
Unlike other AI pins, Proud's product feels like a solution to a real problem. These are problems that, as a journalist, I wrestle with all the time. My biggest question right now is whether there are enough people like me in the world to make Proud's business model sustainable.