Would you be comfortable if your coworker recorded a casual conversation you had with them in the office kitchen? What if everyone sitting around the boardroom was quietly recording the meeting instead of typing notes on their laptop?
Plaud AI aims to simplify notetaking with its hardware devices, which use the latest AI models to record, transcribe, and summarize your conversations. It offers two products, the Plaud Note and smaller Note Pin (both $159). The Note slips into a pocket on the back of a phone, or a button-down shirt (most of its customers are corporate executives). The Note Pin can dangle from a necklace, or go around your wrist.
Plaud Note (Credit: Emily Forlini)
Plaud CEO Nathan Xu founded the company in 2021 after a career in investment banking. He found himself in “too many meetings” that were time consuming yet provided little clarity on next steps. He’s not alone. A recent study found that 60% of knowledge workers cannot focus at work because of endless emails, messages, and meetings at work.
“Productivity is broken,” Elina Tsao, head of brand at Plaud.AI, told us at a recent media event.
Is AI the only way way out? The concept sounds appealing, and Plaud’s tech could be promising. PCMag’s Brian Westover tested out the Note and called it “the best AI hardware product I’ve used.” At the same time, the device could introduce new problems and norms for which society may not be ready. Will people report problematic coworkers to HR by sharing a conversation Plaud recorded? “I think that will happen,” Tsao says.
While the concept of voice recordings and transcription software is not unique, the scope of Plaud’s vision might be, and its appetite to explore and push the boundaries on whether recording everything, all the time, will ever be socially acceptable. Plaud now has one million users, mainly in the US, followed by Japan and France (home of Mistral AI). It’s preparing to sell its devices in big box stores; look for them in Best Buy this August.
The Plaud Note is a very thin rectangle that can slip into a cell phone pouch (right). (Credit: Emily Forlini)
How Does It Work, and Why Hardware Instead of an App?
To use the Plaud Note or Note Pin, you have to turn it on—but that could change. “We debate internally if [the device] should always be on, but for now it’s not,” Tsao says.
Tiny microphones on the device record the wearer’s conversations, with up to 30 hours of recording time per charge on the Plaud Note and 20 hours on the Note Pin. Plaud then sends the files to the cloud, where AI models like Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, OpenAI’s GPT-4.1, and Claude 4 transcribe and summarize them. Plaud accesses the models through an enterprise API.
In the Plaud mobile app, you can see all the conversations, including a summary as well as the full transcript. A desktop version is coming, Tsao says, but the company “doesn’t think it’s ready yet.”
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(Credit: Plaud)
The software will suggest next steps from each meeting or conversation. If the Plaud user wants to share a conversation with a coworker who wasn’t there, they can easily send it to them. You can also ask questions about the conversations through a chat interface, which is powered by OpenAI models, so “it’s basically ChatGPT,” Tsao says.
She gives the example of someone asking to describe the role each person played in the meeting. It might label Speaker 1 as a decisive leader, while Speaker 2 sounded more like a cautious partner who spent more time pushing back than others.
But wait, couldn’t all of this happen in an app, using the phone’s microphone? Yes, but Tsao argues that having a physical device increases transparency. If someone sees it, they are more likely to know they are being recorded. It may also be more discreet than a big phone brick; it all comes down to personal preference. Whichever company can do this—whether it’s a mobile app creator or Big Tech heavyweight like Apple—”will win,” Tsao says.
“We were thinking we couldn’t compete with Apple intelligence when it first came out, but look where it is now,” she adds. “A lot of features are not delivered.”
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The Plaud Note charges by placing the back on this cord. (Credit: Emily Forlini)
No Easy Fix for Privacy, AI Hallucinations
Apple is taking its time with its AI products, in part because there are many privacy concerns. Plaud encrypts the recordings it sends to the cloud, but it’s still feeding your data—and that of the people you record—into the AI models on which it relies.
“Privacy is our top priority given the nature of this product,” says Tsao. The appropriate etiquette for Plaud wearers is probably to tell others when they are being recorded, but if the devices become common among employees at a certain company, for example, everyone may assume they are being recorded all the time.
Note Pin (Credit: Plaud)
Around 20% of Plaud users are doctors seeking to save time with notetaking, so Plaud is now HIPAA-compliant. Still, if you work in the medical field it’s worth double-checking that it complies with your policies. “Doctor” is one of 30 settings templates users can select, such as “lawyer” or “therapist,” which Plaud says fine-tunes the AI more appropriately for each field. Theoretically, the more data your Plaud device consumes, the more it could understand your profession and give you customized suggestions.
Another huge risk is AI hallucinations, which even Google CEO Sundar Pichai admits is not an easy problem to solve. Some of OpenAI’s most recent models hallucinate more than previous ones, News reports. Plaud says it has no control over whether the AI hallucinates because it doesn’t build the models. Better hope your boss doesn’t review an inaccurate summary of a conversation with you, and that your doctor crafts an accurate care plan.
The accuracy also depends on the language of the conversation. English is “more than 95% accurate,” Tsao says. Other languages are much less. The device can also struggle to recognize unique names or brand names. To solve that, you can add them to the device’s “glossary,” Tsao says. She’s added “Plaud” to hers because the device sometimes think it’s the Claude chatbot (and sometimes we do, too).
About Emily Forlini
Senior Reporter
