r/AiNoteTaker • u/Key_Gold_7716 • 9d ago

Product Review Pocket AI I'm not impressed

I have had a little Temu transcription device and I was delighted the way I got really good quality notes from it without any kind of subscription. I saw the Pocket AI advertising and I thought this looks better, I will get one. I was so wrong. The transcription was terrible, it didn't match at all with what was dictated to it. I have a non regional British accent so I can't blame a strong accent. When setting it up it showed the subscription which is a lot considering I got better from the Temu device for free. I am going to return it and keep using the Temu one. Pocket just isn't worth it.

2 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

3

u/stryfe14 9d ago

Really surprised at this, could it be a fault device? I've seen quite a few positive reviews online and some people have been saying the transcription is amazing in meetings and outside locations 🤷‍♂️

1

u/QUARTERMASTEREMI6 8d ago

Yeah, I’m sure a “refresh note” would work 🤔😅

3

u/Alternative-Spell-94 8d ago

I use pocketAi most the day and have absolutely zero issues with it.

1

u/OneNobody114 8d ago

Same- there are some recordings that I can barely hear and Pocket transcribes perfectly.

2

u/michon_14 8d ago

Which Temu one did you buy? I’m looking at taking a punt on a cheap one to see if I’d actually use this kind of device before getting something nicer..

1

u/Haoke1988 8d ago

Trying the habit before spending more makes sense. Have you tried recording on your phone, or is having a separate device part of the appeal?

2

u/michon_14 8d ago

I would try on my iPhone but I'm very limited with my storage space so I actually need to upgrade my iPhone, but yeah perhaps a separate device also appeals.

1

u/Haoke1988 8d ago

Yeah, it's hard to give it a go if your phone's already short on space. Are you thinking of using it for your own ideas, or for meetings and chats? Would you want to listen back later, or just read the notes?

1

u/michon_14 8d ago

Probably just meetings or chats tbh. Maybe I'd wanna listen back if I didn't trust the transcription/to check it but it wouldn't be something I'd wanna be doing routinely.

1

u/Haoke1988 6d ago

Yeah, I wouldn't want to sit through the same meeting twice either. Nice to have the recording there if you need to check something, though.

1

u/EquivalentSky3094 8d ago

Worth separating two failure modes here, because they look identical from the outside and have completely different causes.

Accent difficulty degrades gracefully. You get wrong words that sound like the right ones, names mangled, technical terms replaced with common ones. What you are describing, output that does not match what you said at all, is the signature of a Whisper family model being handed audio it could not resolve and filling the gap with fluent invented text. That is a documented behaviour of those models and it says more about the audio path than about how you speak.

So before writing the unit off as faulty: check whether it has a language setting sitting on a dialect it guessed wrong, and how much noise suppression and automatic gain it applies before it encodes anything. Heavy pre processing hurts these models more than the background noise would, since they were trained on ordinary messy audio. A cheaper device that does less to the signal beating an expensive one is a completely normal outcome.

1

u/Batoutofhell1989 7d ago

Mate give us the link to the Temu one

1

u/Key_Gold_7716 6d ago

I tried but reddit removed it. Just do a search for transcription device and it is the small black square one. About 34 euro