There’s a brand-new AI hardware gadget hitting the market. It doesn’t have lofty ambitions of completely replacing your phone and then spectacularly failing at that. It doesn’t seek to drape a dystopian AI companion around your neck. Nor does it want to complicate the very concept of apps by stuffing useless AI inside an orange box.

It’s called the Plaud NotePin, and its simple purpose is to record whatever you command it to do with the press of a button. It’s a straightforward pitch, and the product itself appears quite uncomplicated and versatile. Recommended Videos

The Plaud NotePin takes the form of a small capsule. Thanks to the accessories offered by Plaud, you can wear it like a humble pin with a clip on your shirt. There’s a neat little band that turns it into a stylish necklace, which actually doesn’t look half bad. And finally, you can also wear it on your wrist as a band without it looking overly tacky.

All you have to do is press a button, and the NotePin will start capturing the voices around it. Plaud is promoting it as a companion for recording interviews, meetings, classroom lectures, or any other conversation you deem worthy of being saved as a digital file. Once the recording is done, the magic of AI comes into play.

Plaud has deployed OpenAI’s GPT-4 model for voice transcription and summarization. All the data can be accessed through the mobile app and a web dashboard.

Taking it a step further, Plaud has crafted a series of templates that convert voice transcriptions into various formats, just as you would use AI products like Apple’s Writing Tools or Paragraph AI to transform a wall of text into an email, a bullet list, a project slide, or other forms.

For example, there are speaker labels and Find My integration to help locate the NotePin if it gets misplaced. Plaud offers 300 minutes of recording per month in the free plan, which also includes perks like nine summarization templates, speaker labels, AI suggestions, integration with platforms like Slack, and mind-map visualization.

The Pro plan, which costs $6.60 per month (billed annually at $79 per year), allows users to create custom templates and access over 20 professionally designed summary layouts and, most importantly, 1,200 minutes worth of transcribed audio recordings each month.

The Plaud NotePin supports 59 languages and will be available for $169. Preorders start today, and the NotePin will be available on Amazon in the coming weeks.

If you’re intrigued by the idea of the Plaud NotePin but can’t wait, you can also give the Pluad Note a try. It costs $159, looks incredibly sleek, and is already one of my favorite hardware purchases this year. You can see what it looks like in the photo above, and I’ll have more to say about the Plaud NotePin very soon.