Plaude NotePin is a great AI voice recorder, but it’s doomed to failure

Kudos to Plaud for one thing: In a year marked by high-profile failures and a lot of AI vaporware, he’s created an AI gadget that does exactly what it says it does, and does it pretty well. The gadget is called the NotePin, a $169 pill-shaped voice recorder that can transcribe, summarize, and extract important information from your audio. That’s something that current AI systems can do well! There’s good, mature technology at every step of the process, from tiny microphones to speech-to-text transcription, natural language processing, and AI summarization. The NotePin does it well.

But the reason NotePin works is also the reason I don’t recommend buying it. AI voice recording is great and useful, and it’s becoming more widely available. With iOS 18 or macOS Sequoia, you get transcripts and summaries built into the Voice Memos app. Google’s Pixel Recorder app is great and is built into both Pixel phones and the Pixel Watch. You can get similar features from a number of apps, too. Do you need a dedicated voice recorder?

This is, of course, the age-old question about AI assistants as a whole. Are they a feature of your existing devices, or a gadget category in their own right? Plaud’s argument for dedicated hardware is more or less the same as any other AI startup’s: ease of use is everything. The NotePin’s accessories are the foundation of its appeal: There’s a braided cord so you can wear it around your neck, a wristband so you can wear it Fitbit-style on your arm, and a clip so you can put it almost anywhere.

While testing the NotePin, I mostly wore it around my neck and used it to jot down reminders while driving, babble long ideas while walking the dog, and summarize calls and conversations. It’s certainly handy that I can simply reach down, press the NotePin until it vibrates to indicate it’s recording, and then babble on about nothing while my necklace dutifully listens. Once, when I was particularly enjoying a podcast, I simply played the whole thing on speaker so that the NotePin could transcribe and summarize it. The NotePin is easier to access than a phone in your pocket, and definitely easier than holding your wrist in front of your mouth for minutes at a time while shouting at your watch. The format definitely matters.

The NotePin’s microphone is okay: The audio it records never sounds amazing, but in every realistic scenario I tried, it was good enough for solid transcription. Plaud estimates the device’s battery life to last about 18 hours of recording or 30 days of standby time, and during my testing, I recorded about four hours over about 10 days before the battery simply reached “low.” The NotePin charges on a small charging pad that I’m sure I’ll lose soon, and I wish it were just a simple USB-C plug. But look: this thing works. It does what it says on the tin.

The main problem with NotePin, and honestly with any other AI gadget, is that it’s not very useful on the other end. After you’ve made a few recordings with NotePin, you import them into the Plaud app, which is relatively quick and easy. But then you have to go to each recording and manually tell the app to transcribe them, choose the “template” you want to use for your summary, and then come back a few minutes later to see what it’s come up with. (You get 300 minutes of transcription and basic templates per month for free, or $80 per year for 1,200+ templates and features.) It’s just too much tedious work. Besides, how much effort am I really saving if I have to pull out my phone — twice! — at all?

The transcripts are good, and the summaries are helpful, and so far I haven’t had any major errors or hallucinations. But once they’re done, they just live in reverse chronological order in the Plaud app. The app correctly noticed that one of my recordings was a reminder to buy retinol; it didn’t remind me of anything. It simply gave it the title “Reminder to buy retinol.” When I wandered around the kitchen, speaking my shopping list into NotePin, the app accurately transcribed the list for me, but simply titled the note “Shopping list with miscellaneous groceries and household items.”

It’s not NotePin’s fault that it can’t do more than turn my pointless ramblings into text files. It’s not Plaud’s fault either. I just really want it—and really should—to take this shopping list and add it to the shopping list I already have on my phone. It should add this reminder to my to-do list. At the very least, the app should be able to link my shopping list note to my Other note from the shopping list, but can’t do that. Ultimately, no matter what you record, you probably want Down something about it later, and Plaud simply can’t do most of these things. Eventually, the Plaud app started to feel like just another inbox I had to check.

All of this makes your phone or smartwatch an unbeatable opponent in the war of AI assistants. They may be slightly less convenient—you have to pull them out of your pocket instead of just reaching into your chest—but they are much more connected to the rest of your digital life. Building an entire world around a transcription app just doesn’t make sense.

It’s possible that these things will become more open over time. Apple and Google could open up APIs that would allow AI assistants to interact with other apps on your phone, or, in theory, assistants could become smart enough to simply interact with apps on your behalf. Lots of developers are working on both options. But as it stands now, the Plauds, Humanes, and Rabbits of the world simply can’t do enough. AI voice recorders are a great idea — but they’re not a new kind of gadget.