Navigate your way through the day with this AI note-taker
You'll never forget a thought or misremember a meeting again.
You'll never forget a thought or misremember a meeting again.
You'll never forget a thought or misremember a meeting again.
By Gus Silber
“The world is too much with us, late and soon,” wrote the poet William Wordsworth, more than 200 years ago.
What would he make of our modern age, when we hold in our hands devices that carry the weight of the world, wherever we go?
The other day, in my hurry to leave the house for my morning stroll, I left my phone behind. At first, I felt lost. What if I missed an important email or WhatsApp? What if I needed to call someone in a hurry? Then I felt strangely liberated.
I reached into my wallet and pulled out a sliver of brushed metal, not much thicker than a credit card.
I pressed a button, felt a satisfying haptic buzz, and began talking to myself. A random ramble as I ambled along. We all know that walking and thinking go hand in hand, but thoughts can be fleeting.
There are few things more frustrating than trying to piece together the fragments of a great idea or illuminating insight from memory. (Archimedes was able to do it after leaping from his bath, but then again, he was Archimedes.)
This is why, after just a few days of testing, the Plaud Note has become my go-to note-to-self device, displacing even my iPhone, which has an awkward habit of running out of battery at the crucial moment of Eureka.
The Plaud Note, on the other hand, has a battery life of up to 30 hours and a continuous standby time of up to 60 days.
That puts it in the same category of endurance as the Kindle, another device that is dedicated to doing just one thing, and doing it very well. Except, the Plaud Note can do more than just one thing.
Upon returning from my amble, I synced it with the Plaud app on my iPhone, and it transcribed my ramblings with great accuracy, including timestamps and punctuation. But that is only the start.
The Plaud Note describes itself as a ChatGPT Empowered Al Voice Recorder, which means it can turn your transcribed thoughts, no matter how rough they are, into structured and coherent reports, based on more than 30 professional templates.
This allows you to use the device as a hands-free note-taker during meetings, interviews, seminars, lectures, brainstorms, and even doctors’ appointments.
While I prefer using the Plaud Note as a standalone voice recorder, free of the distractions of a smartphone, you can just as easily affix it magnetically to the back of your phone, opening up its dual application, with a flip of the button, as a recorder of phone conversations. These, too, the AI will transform into handy bullet-pointed summaries and action reports.
In my testing, I was especially impressed by the Plaud Note’s noise-cancelling capability. It was able to capture, with clarity, a conversation in a buzzing coffee shop in a mall, where I could hardly hear myself talk.
There is also a wearable version of the device, called the Plaud NotePin. It's about the size of a tube of lip balm. You can attach it to your clothing, wear it as a pendant, or even as a wristwatch.
The principle and the operation are the same. You press once to start recording and twice to finish, before syncing with the app on your phone or computer.
Either way, the Plaud Note is my new favourite device of the AI era, and I suspect that even William Wordsworth would have liked to have one with him on his ambles, just in case he left his notebook and quill at home.
The Plaud Note and Plaud NotePin are distributed in South Africa by GANELEC, and are available from Takealot, Amazon, and MAKRO.
