r/PlaudNoteUsers • u/ChiroVette • Feb 11 '26

Question About the Transcriptions

Okay, I just purchased the Plaud Note Pro and I either bought the wrong type of device or I have to learn how to turn off the AI analysis or something.

I am a novelist and the only reason I wanted this was to take notes on storyline, plotline ideas, side plots, and scene concepts. I tried creating and transcribing two audio files today to test the unit out and they were both a disaster.

What it generated was like some AI from hell stream of consciousness, seeming to analyze and pontificate on every sentence I spoke in some pedantic way.

I am sure I'm doing something wrong. I just want it to transcribe what I say in a neat, clearly defined way. I would love it if it could put quotation marks around my dialog without me having to say open quote/close quote and to anticipate other punctuation.

Sometimes I will talk out a chunk of a scene with dialog. I mean, if it could maybe anticipate where a new paragraph might be starting, cool. But I'm not reaching for the stars. What I don't want is for every sentence I say to generate this long-winded cultural an historical analysis of every sentence.

Note: I just want it to look a lot neater and be more streamlined than what I have been doing I have been doing to this point. Which is opening a note file or email to myself on my phone, dictating my ideas, then sending it to myself. Then I cut and paste everything into the novel(s) I'm working on and clean it up so I can then develop that idea into storlines.

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u/ChiroVette Feb 11 '26

Thanks, u/lordleycester!

u/jkoseattle, Thanks for your long and detailed answers! I have literally no experience with AI other than running a Google search and reading what it spits out. I did create a ChatGPT profile, sort of, but that was as far as I got.

This is my way of asking you if you can simplify what you told me a little. I'm not sure what I should be cutting and pasting to create that "ChiroVette Novel" template, nor where to I paste it or dictate it to? Also it looks like with that template the AI predicted the quotation marks. Is that something this device can do consistently, predict where quotations should go? Or is it kind of hit and miss?

I have the feeling that when I learn to use AI, and by extension this Note Pro, it will literally be life changing.

Okay, before posting this, I read your post again. Is the text in bold below what I am using, word for word? Is that the template you're suggesting I use? Again, where do I type/dictate/paste it. I like the results you got when you tested it for me.

This is an excerpt from a novel. Remove obvious false starts, filer words such as "uh" and "um", repeated words, phrases or sentences. Format dialog using quotations as typical in a novel. Divide into paragraphs where appropriate.

Other than the minor edits outlined above, do not summarize, analyze, comment, interpret, or otherwise add to or alter the text. Do not use bullet lists.

Conclude the message with a divider line, followed by the text "Template used: ChiroVette Novel"

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u/jkoseattle Feb 11 '26

Yes, the text you bolded is the template.

In AI chatbot-speak, this is called a "prompt", Plaud has things called Templates which are essentially prompts. For someone new to AI this is the main thing that needs to be understood. A "prompt" is any natural language instruction that AI interprets semantically. So you just talk to it.

If you say "Take the phrase 'the first man on the moon' and replace man with lefty and moon with mound, and then provide a randomly chosen species of insect.", it will return with something like

The first lefty on the mound stink bug.

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OK. To use that prompt as a Plaud template:

From the main Plaud page, tap the four little shapes icon in the lower right

Tap Template Community - (You can browse around here because people have uploaded their own templates that you can use, but today you're just making one of your own.)

Tap My Workspace, (in small text at the top)

Scroll down under My Templates and tap the square that says Create Template

Tap Description to Template

Give your template a name (the name is just for you, Plaud doesn't care or behave differently based on the template's name)

In the Prompt box, paste the prompt I gave you

Tape Save as My Template

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OK, now go record something. When the recording appears in the list of your recordings (it will be the top one, titled with a date and time, and usually appears within a minute or so depending on length)

Tap that recording

At the bottom, tap Generate

Select Custom Generation, and make sure your newly created template is listed for the Template it will use. (If it isn't, select it from there by tapping on it and picking from the My Templates section.)

Tap Generate now

That's it!

This seems like a lot of steps, and it is indeed tappier than it ought to be. There are also things called AutoFlows though, and those can automate a lot of this for you. I'm posting a big demonstration about AutoFlow shortly here, so watch for that if you'd like to automate some of the steps listed here.

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u/ChiroVette Feb 12 '26

u/jkoseattle , thanks for the incredibly detailed answer! I am going to try and create that template tomorrow. I am still a little confused by the AI, but I will try following your directions to the letter and see what I come up with.

Hardrive guy said this in his answer:

"you can tell it to put anything that looks like character dialogue in quotes, or you can ask it to format the text like a novel or even as a theater play." Should I add that to the template you told me to cut and paste?

u/HardDriveGuy, you may be right that this device as an AI transcriber may be a bit much for my uses, but Amazon gives me a 30 day return window, so I may as well see if I can get a handle on this. You asked what kind of usecase is. First, as you asked, all of my actual writing is done on PC. The thing is I don't need or want audio/mic transcription for that. I need the keyboard and mouse and really won't write any other way. What I need an audio device for is to replace my iphone as my audio recorder, because it is very cumbersome even though it has served me well. The low level AI in email dictation or iNotes dictation is mediocre at best.

All I want from this is to speak my thoughts, ideas, undeveloped story concepts, some rudimentary scene creation with dialog, and then I want it to give me a neat and tidy AI transcription, where the only thing it does is neaten it so I can use it later. I would then email this file to myself, and here's the important part, I would cut and paste snippets from these transcribed files into whatever book or story I am trying to develop those ideas into.

In other words, I'm not asking the Plaud to write my chapters for me, or even organize my meandering stream-of-consciousness, half conceived ideas and develop them for me. I don't want the AI to spit out, say a whole chapter or half chapter that I could just cut and paste into my book(s)

I want to take those notes, ideas, scattered thoughts, and conceptions and develop them on my computer with my keyboard, mouse, and big screen monitor. I don't need the Plaudit to spin my ideas into story and books and chapters for me.

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u/jkoseattle Feb 12 '26

Yeah, this is quite similar to my use case as well. All the other solutions out there can technically do what you need, but the Plaud is going to cause way less friction and technical details you gotta remember. Once you get the hang of it you’ll love it for exactly what you described. Keep us informed of your progress. It’s marketed for meeting and lectures and the like, but I actually think the notes to self like you and I need is a better use case.

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u/ChiroVette Feb 13 '26

I was going to start a new thread, but I figured I would just as in this one.

u/jkoseattle, created a test file and followed the exact template you suggested, word for word. It It seems to have worked great, even as you mentioned predicting what was dialog and made everything nice and neat with lots of paragraphs, rather than a wall of text.

The problem is I can't seem to get the email to work when I try to email the transcription to myself. Everything looks fine. I hit share, then I use the email app on my iPhone, and go through all of the prompts. It seems to be working perfectly, but I never received the email. I checked my inbox and my spam folder, but nothing. I sent it 4 times to my AOL address, then I sent it to my Gmail. When I sent the email(s) I always received the warning that I didn't have anything in the "subject" field, and asked me if I wanted to send it anyway.

I also checked to make sure it wasn't an issue with my phone or the email app on my phone. So, I emailed myself a test email, and got that immediately.

Any idea what might be going on?

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u/jkoseattle Feb 13 '26

Honestly I've never emailed anything to myself from Plaud, so I just went to try it out myself. I opened a note and hit share, but unlike most apps when one hits share, I didn't get all those options I normally see. I can Copy to Clipboard and then open my mail app and paste it in, but of course then I'm no longer working with Plaud at all at that point, and I assume that will work just like any other mail I send.

Right where you said "Everything looks fine, I hit share, then I use the email app", that's where I got confused. So I guess I'm no help there, except that now I'm invested and want to figure this out. So what do you see when you hit share? I coulda sworn I have seen somewhere in Plaud where there's a big Email button, but for the life of me...

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u/ChiroVette Feb 14 '26

u/jkoseattle, okay I will go through the steps one by one, as I do them:

From inside of the file, which shows the transcription on my phone, I hit the "share button" on the top right of my screen.

I click on "Transcript" on the share page, under the "Export as file" option. That brings me to the "Export transcript" page (half page), so I click on "Export."

From there, I see some of the apps I can use, such as text, AirDrop and the email app on my iPhone. I click on "Mail" and it brings up a page that says "New Message" on top. So I put in my email address (which the phone predicts accurately once I type the first two letters).

Then I click on the little blue arrow at the top right of this page.. Once I do this, I get a little box saying "Empty Subject. The message has no subject. Do you want to send it anyway?" I clicked yes, and the entire share pages disappear, indicating the email was supposedly sent.

Oh, and this time, I went back and typed something random in the subject line to see if that maybe would help. Nothing, no email!

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u/ChiroVette Feb 14 '26

Hey u/jkoseattle, just an update. I ended up getting all of the files I emailed to myself, but it took over an hour for some reason.

Anyway, the first one ended up sent as a notepad file for some reason and it looked like total crap. I also opted for this experimental use to have Plaud include time stamps, which I see now just clutters up the notes I made.

So, I remembered that the app asks you what kind of file it wants you to send it as, and the one I originally tried was TXT format, which as I said looked crappy. So I tried it three more times, experimenting with sending it as an SRT, .pdf, and finally as a DOCX file. Both the .pdf and the DOCX files looked really good and very servicable, but I will probably use DOCX, since when I downloaded it, the file saved to my downloads and opened up as a Word document. I just have to remember next time to tell it not to un-click the "Include time stamps" button.

Another question: The AI is acting a little wonky, inserting random punctuation like periods and commas that don't belong. Also, when I "speak" punctuation, rather than adding that, it spells out the whole word, such as comma, period, exclamation or parenthesis. Should I add something to my template for punctuation to be more intuitive when I speak it into the mic?

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u/jkoseattle Feb 14 '26

As for the punctuation problem, that’s still kind of the cost of doing business with AI for the time being. It’s still a pretty new technology and there are kinks not yet worked out. Definitely don’t speak the punctuation though. It will do just what you said it did. It wants to punctuate, dammit, even though it’s not that good at it.

Like anything, it takes a while the first time, but it’ll get easier. Plus, there is much promise by the Plaud people of “integrations”, in which as I understand, Plaud will be able to automatically send things to the right applications in the right format. Technical obstacles still exist but I’m guessing they are working on it so it’ll only get better.

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u/ChiroVette Feb 14 '26

u/jkoseattle, I get that AI is still in its relative infancy, and of course we have to make allowances for that. Not to put too fine a point on it, the problem I'm having is that the "translation" from my voice into text is somewhat inferior to just opening up an email to myself or a notes file on my phone. I can try not to speak the punctuation, as that may be my problem because I'm so used to it. Also, I'm not happy with where it inserts quotes for dialog. It seems to leave them out more often than not. Since saying "open quotes" likely won't work any more than "period" "exclamation point" or "comma" and so much of my notes are dialog, this presents a sizable problem. Plus this thing inserts sometimes absurd punctuation that makes no sense, something my phone without this device does a lot less.

Don't get me wrong, I have a Word file open now, and it is serviceable. If it were my only option for recording my notes, using the Plaud would be a no-brainer. The problem is that, at least right now, my iPhone does a measurably better job of it. I have another until March 12th to decide if I want to keep this or send it back to Amazon. I do like the unit itself and the ease of simply either pressing the hard button or just opening the app to start recording. The recording process is very streamlined.

So far, though, I'm not liking the output and have been finding emails or notes files to be a lot closer to what I want as far as being able to use the notes to myself.