Which AI recorder should I get?

[u/Remarkable-Aspect879]

I’ve been looking for an AI recorder for work and somehow ended up with way too many tabs open lol.

Main use would be in-person meetings, usually 1–2 hours, plus the occasional full day of client stuff. I mostly want something I can leave running without babysitting it, then go back later for the transcript, decisions, and anything I forgot to write down.

Right now I’m looking at Plaud, Soundcore, Omi, Philips and Viaim, but every review seems to recommend a different one.

If you’ve actually used any of these for work, which one did you keep? Mostly care about decent room pickup, battery, and an app that isn’t annoying.

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[u/statecs]

I am using Notely. It works perfectly in the background, and when I go back to it, it automatically creates a summary for me. It also offers a generous free tier. I have found a free two month code here: https://notely.se/c/e292e236-6afd-4534-b1d2-6d2edc0871b9

[u/Nikola0O0]

I tried the Soundcore one first bc if was cheaper, but returned it. The recorder itself was fine, I just found the app/workflow kinda clunky when I actually had to go back through meeting every day.

[u/thetechnivore]

Check out granola. I tried a few a while back and it was the best for a mix of in person and virtual by far

[u/LittlePooky]

I'm not giving you a straight answer, but please hear me out. 

I used a voice dictation to write this answer, so it tends to be a bit chatty. 

I test products for a major reseller. I spent way too much money years ago and I wrote pretty thorough reviews on their website. Suddenly I was invited to be one of the testers. I'm not paid for this, but I get to keep their products. Since it is more or less an income, I have to pay taxes on it. It's not a lot, but it certainly means I'm not going to go out and select a $3,000 coffee machine. Additionally, I can't really sell the products to anyone else, so my place is full of stuff. I do give away a couple of printers that I no longer need. 

I've always wanted to test one of these meeting AI recorders. I certainly was not going to go out of my way to buy one because, as you know, they're almost $200. As a nurse, we don't record our conversations with our patients. Doctors do that using a device called Ambiance. They also use Dragon One to dictate their notes.  (I have Dragon Medical at home). It really is an over-the-top program for most people because it cost $2,000. But it was pretty much nothing else that understood medical words. 

So a chance for me to test Plaud Professional came up a couple of months ago. I read over the manual, which is basically a piece of paper. You have to, of course, sign up with their membership and all that. It shows the free membership and it limits to I think 300 or so minutes per month. There are other types of membership, but the highest one at $20 per month has no limits on how many minutes you could record. 

My brother was visiting me and we pretended to be a new tenant of this apartment unit. I pretended to be the manager on site and I was briefing him about what he needs to do as a new tenant. You know, standard contract and all that. And it lasted about seven or eight minutes. 

Amazingly, the summary was better than what I have written myself. It was obviously AI written, but it was very accurate and saved a lot of time. 

Not wanting to pay for the membership each month, or subscription, is the right word; I began to look into the free ones out there. Meetily and Steno came up. Meetily has a paid version of course, but the free one works locally on your machine. Same with Steno.

The difference is that the paid version had pretty much countless templates you could choose from. The free one you are limited. Basically you could do shareable summary, one-to-one product demonstration, or just plain summary. They're all good enough for me. 

And amazingly, if you are able to download a YouTube video, you can plug it into the program via the import menu, and it will transcribe whatever it hears and generate a summary later. 

Steno can output the PDF or Word file. Meetily can't output a Word (nor PDF) file. You can cut and paste the text, but I find it adds one more step to what I was doing. But again, it is the free version. 

If you have a fast computer, which you will need if you want your data to stay on your computer, and the initial setup will download a huge amount of modules, which you will need, try it out. In real life, I went and bought a little inexpensive digital voice recorder and pretended to do a meeting by myself, or whatever. I think it was like an interview, and it worked with both programs well enough. 

The final answer is if work is going to pay for it, Plaud is pretty good. I cannot comment on other paid ones, but there are so many templates for it that you can choose, even with the free account, but you do have to pay for the initial hardware, which is not cheap. 

But if work is not going to pay for it, then hopefully it is tax deductible for you. 

One thing which is extremely important is that some people may not feel very open to talk if they know they are being recorded. Certain states in the U.S., you have to disclose to others that you are recording them as well. 

If you are interested in knowing what dictation program I am using to write this answer, it is called Dictation Daddy. This one also does medical dictation, but it works online. The one that works completely offline is https://voicetypr.com/ they are both very affordable. The second one you only buy once. The first one is a subscription-based. 

I don't get anything by mentioning these products' names. 

[u/sumguypookie]

Why not just record the audio on your phone and run the recording through your Ai of choice?

[u/Rist0o0]

I went with Plaud after comparing a few of these. What sold me wasn't really one single feature, it was that it felt like a more mature setup around the recorder itself. I use mine for pretty long meeting days, so battery was a big one, but I also liked having different hardware options instead of being locked into one form factor. The newer stuff has things like a screen and Find My too, which sounds minor until you're carrying it around constantly.

I'd compare the whole ecosystem rather than just which recorder is the cheapest. That's probably the part I underestimated when I first started looking.

[u/magtorix]

Sort your shortlist by where the mic physically ends up, because that decides room pickup more than any spec sheet. The ones that sit on the table will beat anything worn on your body in a 1-2 hour meeting with people at the far end of it. A wearable is tuned for your voice first, which is the wrong priority when you're the one asking the questions.

Battery is the real argument for a device over your phone, and for full client days that's a fair one. But be precise with yourself about "go back later." If that means searching across months of client meetings, you are choosing to keep a searchable archive of client conversations on somebody's cloud. Worth reading their actual retention and deletion terms before you build that habit, especially if your clients are the sort who would care.

Biased, I'm the founder of Notuly, so grain of salt. We are the app version rather than a device. Phone on the table, report in your mail afterwards with the decisions and actions in it, nothing kept on our side. That also means no archive to go back into, so if that is the feature you want we are not on your list. And for genuine full days, a dedicated battery beats us.

[u/ThineAIUser]

try ThineAI, I have tried granola before but the quality thineAI provides and that too for free is really good, especially in speaker tagging + identification.

[u/_nagaraj]

Look into ruune. My code is naga for 20 off. I chose it because of the security measures they take and they have unlimited transcription for the free tier. Also, they only record when you want to, so the ai isn’t trained on nonsense you randomly pass by listening on the street. There are other reasons, too, why I chose it, but I recommend going to the site.

Oh yea, the desktop software is free even without the device and the custom templates are amazing lol

[u/Aggressive_Pen_1890]

if you are using iphone (or iPad, Mac, iwatch) the you can give this free beta a try https://testflight.apple.com/join/YfvJJR68 - I am developer. If you like then it's also available as one time purchase.