Plaud's AI-powered NotePin records and transcribes all the conversations around you. The company envisions using that data in the future to construct your digital twin.
If you want to coast through meetings, keep track of everyone you meet, or just remember the name of that obscure dog food your veterinarian told you to feed your pooch, there's a necklace for that. Or a wristband. Or a pin.
Plaud is an AI company that makes the creatively named Plaud Note -- a slim ChatGPT-enabled audio recorder that can be stuck on the back of your phone or slipped into a shirt pocket to record, transcribe, and summarize your conversations.
The company's newest offering is called the Plaud NotePin (the naming scheme doesn't get any better here), and it takes basically all the same features of the Note and packs them into a wearable device about the size of a lipstick tube. The NotePin can be worn as a necklace, a wristwatch, or a pin, or clipped onto something like a lapel.
It costs $169 and lets you record up to 300 minutes of audio per month. To record more than that, you can pay a $79 annual fee for the pro plan that gets you 1,200 minutes per month and additional features like labels that identify different speakers in a transcription.
If a wearable device with these capabilities sounds familiar, it's because we've been here before. AI wearables abound, even if it's not quite clear whether they provide enough utility to make people actually want to wear them. Consumers responded quite poorly to the first wave of big AI gadgets, including the Humane AI pin and the Rabbit R1 -- mostly because they either didn't really work, could have just been an app, or also looked kind of dumb. Friend, the AI necklace that just wants to be your pal has not been released yet, but its announcement was met with a wave of indignant condemnation for how its always-listening design breaks social norms that discourage eavesdropping on conversations. So far, the only AI-adjacent hardware device that has garnered some moderate success is Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses (even if their AI capabilities can use some work). Everything else has either looked too dorky, did not function as advertised, or simply could be bested by the features on a smartphone. Hardware is hard, as they say.
That hasn't stopped the work-oriented AI gadget hopefuls. Wearable devices are being thrust into the world en masse from companies like Plaud, Rewind.AI, and Limitless. (Hardware development takes a while, after all, so chances are these devices were in the works before Humane tanked, and now the companies have got to do something with their gadgets.) Google's Pixel phones and Apple's iPhones are being loaded up with similar productivity features, all in the effort to make people's work lives more manageable and more productive.
Plaud is eager to toss its new little hand grenade into that fray. The company is pitching its new product squarely at productivity junkies -- business bros trying to make connections at conferences, salespeople tracking leads, or anyone eager to get a grip on their innumerable daily meetings. There's a sort of simplicity to the NotePin. Instead of the many promises some AI devices try to keep, the purpose here is primarily for note-taking. Switch the recorder on, let it do its thing, then check the bullet points for the big takeaways later.
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