If you spend most of your day in meetings, the Plaud Note can legitimately save you time. That will probably mean you will need to pay for the monthly subscription which can make this a costly endeavour. However, when factoring in the time saved, it could be worth it for some folks. The case for a student might be a tough sell but other professionals should certainly give it some thought.
-
Design
-
Accuracy
-
Features
-
Value
We were a little apprehensive when the Plaud Note showed up at Stuff’s offices, seeing as previous attempts at dedicated AI-enabled devices haven’t panned out well (see the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1 failures). But the Note didn’t take long to squish our fears of it being another useless device in search of a purpose.
There’s a clear purpose here – to record meetings and provide summaries in various formats. ‘But can’t you do that with an app?’ we were frequently asked.
Yes, we’ll concede, that there are already plenty of services and apps that achieve more or less the same thing as the Plaud Note without the R5,300 price tag. So what’s the point of this thing then? Well, you came to the right place. Let’s find out what you’re getting for your upfront payment and potential monthly subscription fee.
Taking notes the easy way
The Plaud Note isn’t as awkwardly shaped as the aforementioned failed AI devices. It’s made of aluminium alloy and is the same size as a bank card (85.6mm x 53.8mm) and only 3mm thick while weighing 30g. The device itself is pretty simple. The only bits you’ll need to interact with are the button and switch on the front and the magnetic charging point on the back, if you’re being pedantic.
It comes with a nifty MagSafe case that will snap to the back of your iPhone. It also comes with a single-application magnet for Android users and a charging cable that will work when it’s in the case as well as a USB-A to USB-C adapter. You also get 300 minutes per month with the free starter tier of Plaud’s subscription service – AI-powered services cost money, you know.
Inside is a ‘dual pick-up engine’ consisting of two types of microphones, one for capturing meetings and the other for picking up phone calls. You’ll get the best results from the latter if the Note is attached to your phone with the magnetic case.
Now meetings are for sleeping
We fired it up at a Stuff meeting by pressing the button on the front, assuming we’d need to refer back to our manually taken minutes to find out what this thing thought it heard — the same way you might have to repeat yourself for your smartphone’s sake at some point.
We were rather chuffed to find it generated an accurate transcript of the twenty-minute meeting, a mind map, and a detailed summary of the topics of discussion broken down into important points and actionable items with a section at the end about topics or points that ‘were not concluded in the meeting or lack clear action items.’
It is also able to distinguish between different speakers, although you’ll need to tell it who the speakers are. It isn’t yet smart enough to infer that from the context of the recording.
That might change with a future update though. Since we received the device, Plaud has already added the feature to identify speakers you’ve already labelled and while it still needs some work, it’s great to see constant feature updates. You can view the roadmap here and even suggest the features you’d like to see.
Flipping the physical switch and hitting the record button meant we could go from recording an eight-person meeting to a phone call in about five seconds – with similar results.
The major downside here is that you will need to fork out close to R3,000/year for the annual ‘Pro’ plan if you need more than five hours of transcription per month. The Pro plan also provides more templates for your summaries, allows you to create your own templates, and increases the monthly transcription quota to 1,200 minutes.
Plaud Note verdict
It isn’t cheap, but if you spend a lot of your time in meetings or taking notes, the Plaud Note could well prove its worth. That will probably mean you’ll need to fork out for the Pro plan, but that shouldn’t be too hard to claim as a work expense.
There is also the question of how safe your data and recordings are and whether Plaud makes good on its promise to delete them from the cloud as soon as you are done. It isn’t a requirement, it’s disabled by default, and we don’t have a reason to distrust Plaud… yet. But it’s difficult to escape the haze of mistrust when it comes to companies offering ‘AI-enabled’ services.
