If you wish to effortlessly navigate through meetings, remember acquaintances, or recall the specific type of dog food recommended by your vet, there’s an accessory designed just for you. Whether it’s a necklace, a wristband, or a pin, there’s a gadget to assist.
Plaud is an AI enterprise producing the inventively named Plaud Note—a sleek ChatGPT-enabled audio recorder that can be attached to the back of your phone or placed in a shirt pocket to record, transcribe, and summarize your conversations.
The latest product from the company is the Plaud NotePin, which doesn’t deviate much in terms of naming creativity, but compacts all features of the Note into a wearable device approximately the size of a lipstick tube. The NotePin is versatile, designed to be worn as a necklace, a wristwatch, or a pin, or even clipped onto something like a lapel.
It is priced at $169, allowing you to record up to 300 minutes of audio each month. If you need more recording time, there’s a $79 annual pro plan available which offers 1,200 minutes per month and additional functionalities such as labels to identify different speakers in transcriptions.
If the idea of a wearable AI device sounds déjà vu, it’s indeed not a novel concept. AI-integrated wearables have proliferated, though it remains dubious if they offer sufficient utility to attract consistent use. Initially, big AI-powered gadgets like the Humane AI pin and the Rabbit R1 received lackluster responses due to their ineffectiveness, redundancy (could be replaced with an app), or unappealing designs, similar to criticisms faced by the yet-to-be-released AI Friend necklace criticized for its invasive always-listening feature. Among these, only the Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses achieved moderate success despite needing improvements, as detailed here. Most other devices were either too quirky in appearance, malfunctioning, or simply outperformed by smartphones’ capabilities, highlighting the challenge of hardware development as discussed here.
This trend hasn’t halted the determined makers of work-focused AI gadgets. Numerous companies, including Plaud, Rewind.AI, and Limitless, continue to push new wearable devices, likely developed before the market rejected Humane. Both Google Pixel phones and Apple iPhones are also incorporating similar productivity tools aimed at enhancing work efficiency.
Plaud’s latest launch targets productivity enthusiasts—such as networking professionals and anyone managing numerous meetings. They introduce the NotePin, a simplistic device focused on effective note-taking. Simply activate the recording, allow it to document the conversation, and later, review the key points it captured.
“Transferring AI innovations onto already digitized online data is common, yet vast amounts of data still permeate our daily interactions,” explained Plaud CEO Nathan Hsu. The NotePin aims to harness the data from what we speak, hear, and observe in our everyday environments,” Hsu noted during a press briefing about the product launch.
Transcribing your life is a noble endeavor. Delegating much of the grueling work of manually transcribing interviews or meeting notes to a reliable speech recognition service can significantly ease the process. However, as a journalist who often resorts to such automated aids for transcription, I have found that these services are far from flawless. They frequently produce incorrect sentences, misinterpret names, or distort fundamental facts.
Avijit Ghosh, a policy researcher at Hugging Face, observes that AI speech recognition systems traditionally struggle with accents. This can lead to misunderstandings. Ghosh notes, combining this with the peculiar errors that AI might introduce, the end result often falls short of accurately capturing the event. Although these tools represent an improvement over previous transcription options, it’s crucial to be aware of their limitations. Depending on these imperfect tools for professional guidance could foster misunderstandings or even cause embarrassment.
“It might completely invent things that were never said,” warns Ghosh.
Moreover, there are security issues associated with relying on AI for business interactions and storing extensive data on wearable devices. Plaud asserts that its cloud-based transcription and summarization services are securely encrypted, but the actual devices are not. If a user misplaces a device, anyone who finds it could potentially access any stored recordings by connecting it to a computer. Despite this risk, Hsu mentions that this scenario is unlikely since the NotePin uses a unique charging connector that would prevent unauthorized access, unless attackers possess a similar device. Yet, as I think about the extents to which hackers might go to pilfer information seen the lengths, even a built-in “find my” feature that aims to prevent device loss does not guarantee complete security in this not entirely secure system.
“In that case, if you’re not taking precautions and you lose the device, that could be accessible,” Hsu says. “But that’s very extreme.”
Ultimately, Hsu has greater ambitions for his company than work-focused devices, though he’s careful to point out that this is what they’re concentrating on now, and he’s cognizant of the uneasiness it might cause.
“We have this grand vision, where what happens if users could just record all of the conversations in their daily lives, maybe even after decades,” Hsu says. “If it always listens to you, it learns you, and over time it gets to know your personality, your preferences, your interactions. Someday, you’re going to be able to utilize AI to reproduce yourself—create this real digital twin. That’s kind of this grand mission, where we think if we’re able to help users connect to so many memories, it’s going to be grand.”
It’s clear that AI has the potential to upend much of how humans operate. But some advocates and experts express concern about what happens when these capabilities are entrusted to AI devices—especially ones that are designed to be worn all the time.
In an interview for a previous story about AI gadgets, Jodi Halpern, a professor of bioethics and medical humanities at UC Berkeley, discussed how relying on AI devices resembles the dependency on services like Google Maps for navigating directions.
“There may be dimensions of human development that just don’t occur anymore,” Halpern comments. “For instance, we might not develop a sense of direction, or the social emotional depth required for interacting with people different from ourselves and being empathically curious. The ever-present notion that something is listening or monitoring us could prevent learning how to be, in a way, alone with ourselves.”
All these philosophical considerations aside, it remains to be seen if people are genuinely inclined to invest in such devices. Plaud presents a promising application, yet it finds itself in a highly competitive market, competing against myriad devices and smartphone apps—gadgets that users already have in their possession constantly.
Moreover, users might discover that the conventional tools they currently use are more developed and effective than these new, flashy inventions.
“Everything that ChatGPT does, it does worse than something else that was designed to do that thing,” Ghosh says. “I think people being gaslit into thinking these systems are more accurate than they are is the main problem.”
