I tested the Plaud Note AI voice recorder — here’s my verdict

The Plaud Note is an AI-powered recording and transcription device, designed for professionals. If you regularly record audio, especially if you need to transcribe or format those recordings, the Note could be for you.

As a journalist, I’ve done my fair share of audio recording and often use transcription services to pull interviews into document format. It’s usually a clunky affair, recording on one device before uploading and transcribing using a web-based service. The Plaud Note and its companion app bundle both processes into a single ecosystem, streamlining the experience.

The Note goes a few steps further, though, harnessing the power of generative AI to interpret and arrange those transcriptions in essentially any way you want. Fellow journalists can output fully formatted Q&A interviews. Employers can generate structured summaries and analysis of interviews with job candidates. Busy professionals can have entire hours-long meetings summarized in whatever way makes most sense for their teams and workflows. The Plaud Note has so much potential.

All that said, the Note isn’t perfect, and I have my doubts about a product so heavily reliant on a smartphone app. But is it worth the money? Find out in my full Plaud Note review.

Plaud Note review: Price & availability

The Plaud note is available from plaud.ai and Amazon. You can buy the Note in silver, black, or starlight, which is like a soft rose gold. In the U.S., the basic package starts at $159, and in the U.K. it's £149 at Amazon.

There's an AI pro plan for $238, which gives you 1200 minutes of transcription per month for 12 months, versus the basic package’s 300 minutes per month. That’s a pretty reasonable price if you ask me, especially for professionals and the corporate sphere.

Both packages come with a black faux-leather MagSafe case, a USB-A charging cable and a stick-on MagSafe ring for mounting the Note on MagSafe devices without its case. You can buy cases in various colors for $19 separately. There's also an accessory kit which costs $13 and features a charging cable, magnetic ring and a USB-C adapter.

There’s only one storage size available, which is 64GB, but that’ll net you plenty of audio files.

Plaud Note review: Design & controls

The Plaud Note is beautifully designed, with a premium-feeling brushed aluminum exterior. At 3.3 x 2.1 x 0.1 inches, and weighing just over 1 ounce, it feels more like a playing card than an audio recorder. It's MagSafe compatible, either by using the case of the included stick-on MagSafe ring, so it'll slot onto the back of your phone and won’t get in the way thanks to the ultra-thin profile. You can take this device everywhere with you with minimal fuss, and always be ready to record.

I would recommend using the faux-leather MagSafe case rather than the stick-on ring, as the case will stop the note’s aluminium body from scratching the back of your phone. If you use a phone case I would recommend taking it off or getting a very strong MagSafe compatible one. Even with my MagSafe phone case, the Note could drop off quite easily. With my phone case off however it stayed fixed where it was.

The Note has a simple but intuitive interface. There's a start/stop recording button, plus a mode toggle to switch between general and call recording modes. Both are thoughtfully positioned on the top right hand side of the device, perfectly positioned for easy reach with your right index finger when holding your phone.

Plaud Note review: Recording

At heart, the Plaud Note is simply a voice recorder with a transcription service built into its companion app. As a recorder, the Plaud performs competently. Its two MEM microphones happily picked up the sound of my voice when I was taking memos. It also easily picked up an entire meeting I hosted with my team over Google Meet. I positioned the Note on my desk near my laptop, with the laptop sound on medium, and the Plaud captured everything we discussed. You can adjust the gain of the MEMs microphones in the Plaud app, and it’ll show you handy suggestions for gain levels based on environmental noise.

In call mode the Note uses a third VCS microphone. The Plaud’s default VCS gain settings were not strong enough to pick up the sound of me and my partner whispering on a call, at least not enough for analysis — I could hear these in the audio recording, but they weren’t loud enough for GPT-4o to recognise and transcribe them.

I would recommend turning the VCS sensitivity to maximum in the Plaud app if recording a call where the other person is speaking quietly or in a noisy environment. You can enable AI-powered vocal enhancements after your call, but this didn’t manage to boost whispered voices at all and even proved destructive to full-volume speech.

Plaud Note review: AI features

The Plaud Note’s real power lies not within the device itself, but rather its companion app, which utilizes GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 to analyze audio files and generate overviews, transcriptions and summaries. At the time of writing, the Note’s implementation of Claude 3.5 is only available in beta, so GPT-4o is the better option.

All three features do exactly what they say on the package. Overviews will select key events or talking points to give you a high level synopsis — although this is also still in beta and I was unable to get it to work. Transcriptions are a straight up conversion of the audio to text, using AI to fill in the gaps, detect people and translate jargon. Summaries are essentially the contents of transcriptions formatted into useful templates by AI, with extra goodies like suggestions and feedback.

Transcriptions

The Note’s GPT-4o transcription is extremely competent, and works better than online transcription services I’ve used in my career, such as Otter.ai and Google Meet’s in-call transcriber. Transcripts came out incredibly accurate, with minimal tweaking required in Google Docs to tidy them up. GPT-4o got names wrong a few times, which could be an issue when recording large meetings for example, but that’s a pretty minor complaint.

I used the Note to record and transcribe both the Price & availability and Design & control sections of this article, and only needed to make minimal tweaks and additions to them for a first draft. Naturally, those sections have since been through the editing process and thinned a little, but the core of what you see is still what the Note recorded and transcribed, and it saved me a lot of time.

The Plaud app can transcribe 112 languages, according to Plaud, making it a viable tool for professionals worldwide.

Summary templates

There are plenty of preset summary templates, including Meeting Notes, Q&A phone calls, Lectures, and more. You can also use an AutoPilot mode, which will decide what template to use based on the analysis of the recording.

I tested out the Meeting Notes template and it did a fantastic job of summarizing my team’s Friday editorial meeting, including key takeaways and action points. It made some suggestions about how we work and things we should pay attention to, but these were all incorrect as GPT-4o hadn’t grasped some of the nuances of our conversation, meaning it lacked necessary context. For example, GPT-4o advised we should set concrete deadlines for our weekend articles in future — we didn’t discuss deadlines because they were obvious and already known to us all, plus the articles were already nearly complete. I can see the suggestions coming in very useful, though, in different scenarios.

I also tested out a phone call Q&A template, to get an idea of how well the Note would pull together an interview in Q&A format. It performed in exemplary fashion, recognizing the different voices and assigning questions and answers to both. It missed one question in a short sample interview over a phone call, but managed to get 90% of the interview transcribed and formatted. I could use the audio recording to add in the final missed question and answer.

Custom templates

You can also create your own templates. You’ll need to create your own detailed prompt for this, but the Plaud app gives you plenty of help in this regard. I created a prompt for the Note to turn my vocal dictations into formatted reviews.

I then tested the Note by reading out several sections of my recent ShiftCam LensUltra review, and the device absolutely nailed it, formatting everything as I specified in my prompt, without changing my words at all — the exception being that it picked up a couple of stutters and repeated sentences I made, and wiped them from the summary. Even when I forgot to dictate a section heading, GPT-4o identified that I’d started a section and that it related to lens performance, formatting appropriately. I was genuinely staggered by the job it did.

Plaud Note review: Other app features

All of the Plaud Note’s features are tweaked using the fantastic Plaud app, which gives you plenty of control over audio settings, transcription, prompts and AI engines, plus helpful guides and descriptions — I’m a total AI novice, and I had no issues using the Note to its fullest thanks to the quantity of support provided on the app.

The app also lets you pick from industry glossaries, making transcriptions more accurate for specific industry areas. You can add custom terms if your preferred jargon is particularly niche.

There’s a useful security feature, too: you can disable USB transfers so that audio files can only be transferred to a device logged into your Plaud account, meaning nobody can pick up the Note and transfer audio files via USB.

All that said, while the app is great, I am always wary of products that rely as heavily as this one does on an app. What happens if Plaud decides no longer to support the app? With no internal transcription, you’re left with only a voice recorder, and those aren’t exactly in short supply.

Plaud Note review: Battery life

The Plaud Note features a 400mAh battery that’ll bag you 30 hours of continuous recording time, according to Plaud, although mileage will vary based on how long you have the device on standby (a standby timer can be configured in the app).

After a deal of fiddling with the device for testing, and recording around 30 minutes or audio, the Note had dropped from its “Full” setting (20-30 hours recording) to “High” (10-20 hours), so I’m not particularly confident about the 30 hour recording figure in real world on/off usage. The battery status isn’t very specific, so it’s difficult to tell precisely how much juice is left, and there’s no way to tell from the device itself — you can only check the battery via the app.

Plaud claims a 2 hour charge time, which proved accurate in testing. Annoyingly, the Note uses a proprietary charging connector, although a USB-C port may well have sacrificed the ultra-thin profile. If you lose your charging cable, though, you’ll have no choice but to fork out for a new one from Plaud.

Plaud Note review: Verdict

I wasn’t expecting to love the Plaud Note as much as I have. As a journalist, simply having the ability to record and transcribe within a single ecosystem is super exciting. However, the stars of the show are the Plaud App’s AI-powered transcription and summary features, which deftly analyze audio files and output genuinely useful and usable documents. Add the premium build, simple but intuitive controls and reasonable price, and it’s incredibly easy to recommend the Note to any professionals who need such features.

However, I have my concerns. We’ve seen a huge array of AI gadgets come to the fore in recent times, from great products like the Note, to downright gimmicky ones like the Rabbit R1. While it feels a little cliché to talk about the AI bubble bursting, it’s nevertheless valid to wonder how many of the countless young companies will still exist in a few years. Will Plaud? And if it won’t, what will happen to the Plaud app, which the Note overwhelmingly relies on? Even if Plaud exists, what if it decides to stop supporting the app? I’m always wary of products whose usability relies so heavily on smartphone or software apps, and that’s exactly the case here. With no app, the Note is simply a voice recorder, and there are better examples of those around if you just want to capture audio.

That said, my reservations aside, in the here and now, the Plaud Note is a fantastic little tool for recording and transcription. It’ll be staying MagSafed indefinitely to the back of my iPhone, that’s for sure.