At IFA 2024 in Berlin, the key phrase “AI” was on everybody’s lips. Among the many host of AI units set to revolutionize our lives, I got here throughout the PLAUD NotePin. This little wearable not solely transcribes all of your voice notes and different conferences, but in addition summarizes and codecs them with LLMs like chatGPT-4o.
PLAUD made fairly a splash final yr with its PLAUD Word. The precept stays the identical with the NotePin as I attempted it out at IFA 2024. It took on the shape issue of a financial institution card that might be connected to the again of your smartphone like a MagSafe cardholder.
What’s new about PLAUD NotePin is its design. It seems to be like a small capsule, just like a wi-fi headphone case. The thought is to have the ability to put on it always to document voice notes on the fly, with out having to take away your smartphone out of your pocket.
To attain this, the producer presents a sequence of equipment: a bracelet, a necklace, and a clip. The PLAUD NotePin could be worn across the neck or wrist, or clipped to a collar.
Transcribe, format, and edit your voice notes with chatGPT-4o
The place’s the AI in all this? PLAUD NotePin works with an app (Android and iOS). All you might want to do is faucet on the capsule’s contact floor to start recording.
As soon as recording begins, the gadget can transcribe every thing you and others stated aloud with OpenAI’s Whisper mannequin. It may possibly additionally summarize, format, and edit these recordings based on completely different “templates” with chatGPT-4o or Claude 3.5.
Transcription will not be instantaneous, as with Stay Transcribe on a Google Pixel 9 (evaluation), for example. You must await a number of seconds for it to occur. NotePin helps 59 languages and may even distinguish between a number of audio system in a dialogue, letting you determine clearly who stated what in your recording.
On this software, you may select from over twenty “templates”. You can too go for the “autopilot” template, which routinely adapts the construction of the abstract to the character and content material of the trade. You’ll be able to even generate a “mind map” from the weather talked about throughout your recording.
The appliance is free and can be utilized with out a subscription. Nevertheless, there’s a month-to-month restrict of 300 minutes of recording time. Even with the paid subscription of $6.60 per thirty days, the month-to-month restrict is just one,200 minutes.
The producer is especially concentrating on professionals to make use of it. Therefore, I discovered it odd to impose such a low time restrict. 1,200 minutes is 20 hours. When you have the misfortune, like me, to work in an atmosphere that holds on to conferences just like the Holy Grail and different workshops, convention calls, and impromptu meet-ups that might have been resolved over e-mails, you are in all probability clocking up over 20 hours value of conferences a month.
The producer means that you can buy recording time extensions if required. This quantities to $89 for an additional 6,000 minutes.
Would not a easy software have sufficed?
Do you bear in mind linked translators? These had been all the fad between 2015 and 2020. Even again then, we puzzled what was the purpose of getting a tool devoted to such a job, which may simply be accomplished with a smartphone.
With the NotePin, I am asking myself the identical query. Would not the PLAUD software stand by itself? Is not the NotePin merely a roundabout means of charging you for the usage of the applying, which itself will not be free?
Personally, I can settle for the sensible design argument. Sure, it is simpler to put on the NotePin and faucet it to document than to take out your smartphone.
Ditto for the app, I can conceive that with the ability to select from a ton of various codecs to rapidly lay out my assembly minutes is useful. It’s, for now, a bit extra superior than what some native AI features on smartphones supply.
Nevertheless, forking out $169 for the gadget and an additional $6.60 a month to do all this makes it a bitter capsule to swallow as a person.
Are your registrations safe?
Within the software, the web page that results in the privateness coverage would not work. Based on a PLAUD supervisor, as quoted by Gizmodo:
“For NotePin, AI processing is mainly done in the cloud. Transcription is performed using OpenAI Whisper, while summarization and other advanced tasks are handled by cloud computing with LLMs such as GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The results are then displayed on the PLAUD application or on the web. We use PLAUD Privacy Cloud (PPC) to ensure that data is processed securely, giving priority to the user’s privacy.”
PLAUD is primarily supposed for skilled use. The thought is to document conferences at work, brainstorming periods, and comparable conditions. I believe a tool that may document doubtlessly delicate information ought to have a a lot clearer and, above all, way more accessible privateness coverage.
Contemplating the corporate’s construction itself can pose issues for the best way information is dealt with and handed by means of the cloud. PLAUD is a San Francisco-based start-up. Its mother or father firm, Nicebuild LLC, is predicated in Wyoming. This mother or father firm additionally contains one other firm, iZyrec. iZyrec is predicated in China and sells merchandise similar to PLAUD’s.
As soon as once more, I might wish to know the place my information shall be saved. Are they residing on servers in Europe, the USA, or China? That is my main suspicion with such merchandise. Producers can not count on their customers to be consultants in information and worldwide privateness legal guidelines. It is as much as them to elucidate in a transparent and accessible method how our information is dealt with.
What do you consider the PLAUD NotePin? Do you discover such a product related?