PLAUD: AI Voice Recorder 4+

The Plaud recorder and this app have in tandem changed the way I get my thoughts from my brain into reality. I occasionally use it for meetings and phone calls as it is mostly advertised, but the vast majority of use is completely personal. The ability to start recording with the start of a physical button and have it be transcribed and summarized by AI is something I have BEGGED for constantly over the last decade. This is without a doubt the best product I have ever encountered for that purpose.

Let me be clear. There are some issues with Plaud. The cost is quite high. The charger is obscure and hard to source if lost. It sometimes takes a couple tries to get recordings going.

But as a whole, if you are like me and desperate to get fleeting thoughts from your head into your phone with as little friction as possible, there is simply nothing superior to Plaud available. I hope to see updates in the future which improve the software, firmware, and app-side of this tool. Until then, I will be a power user of this life-changing resource.

I think the thing that shocked me, the most is the ability of this tiny little device to pick up various voices from, for instance, in advisory board meeting of people of various genders accents and ages, and very accurately record both the word for word, transcript and even more impressively a brilliant summary of the central points of a meeting, lecture, discussion.
I am a college professor of practice, I also co-manage a large and growing social impact urban farm in Dallas, and impact investing lab at SMU, and mentor various budding entrepreneurs. This tool is invaluable and to coin and old American Express advertisement I think, I never leave home without it.

The PLAUD app and hardware work quite well. The microphone is nice and sensitive, but I question the necessity of the hardware, especially if Apple plans to integrate AI into the iPhone's operating system. One issue I encountered is that exporting recorded audio files in MP3 or other formats does not seem to work. I assume this is a bug that will be fixed, as the website handles it fine.

The hardware performs very well and can be separated from the phone, allowing for long recording sessions. I tried using the ChatGPT app directly with its built-in recorder, but it would cut out after about three minutes of recording. For this reason alone, the PLAUD hardware seems superior. Interestingly, if I take the text file generated by PLAUD and input it into ChatGPT, it outlines as well as the PLAUD app.

Overall, I give this a high rating of four out of five for its capabilities. However, its usefulness may decline with the potential inclusion of better audio recording capabilities in ChatGPT and the iOS operating system.