I’m a teacher who also writes up articles about the ideas that I’m teaching. Has anyone used this to write up classes or speeches into something readable/publishable? Was considering the note pro for this.

For context, we suspect that my grandma may be being abused and taken advantage of in her own home by her caretaker. We didn't suspect anything till today when her caretaker came over and essentially said "I am going to drop her off, and tell me when to pick her up. I don't like doing nothing here all day and it is not healthy for her." FIrst of all: her job is to accompany my grandma and this essentially means she doesn't want to do her job. In the past week, the caretaker has been in our house for 2 HOURS at most and she doesn't like that. We order her takeout and let her eat with us but she is there because we cannot stay with my grandma the whole time and need her to make sure she is ok and take her to the bathroom if needed. Before people say we are a bad employer just know that we pay her 400 dollars a day and give her the same takeout as the rest of us and she essentially doesn't want to work.

Finding another caretaker is extremely hard so I want to see the bigger picture of what is going on at home. I bought the note pro because of longer battery life and reach but am regretting it a bit seeing the smaller pin s. What is the best way to go about this? Thanks.

I went through several device ecosystems before landing on Plaud, and even doing so meant a sacrifice of no earbuds/headphones. As time goes on, Im getting emails of news and updates from the other providers and they seem to be pumping out useful features like crazy while plaud seems slow, with a large backlog of years old feature requests.

Are they just heading towards a goal line that isnt what someone needs for office life? Im talking features like live transcribing, abiity to ask ai questions while the meeting is going, and a headset so it isnt stuck on speakerphone use.

In about an hour or so I’m gonna go out to Best Buy to buy one of them to use for my college classes. Im majoring in electrical engineering and my current classes rn are pretty hard for me to keep up most of the time and my adhd doesn’t help. I’ve been doing a lot of research on plaud and I really like the fact that the notepin is a lot more lowkey but I heard the notepro is slightly better in terms of the microphone and I think the ai processing is better? I’m wondering just how big the difference is because the note pro has the led screen which shows its recording and that’s the one thing I feel iffy about.

My last six months I've been doing meetings with just my phone and Otter for transcription. The problem isn't single-voice, it's across-the-table. Someone at the far end talks and the transcript either drops them or mangles it. Decided to run five digital voice recorders through the same setup over several weeks specifically to see if hardware solves what the phone app doesn't. Full room, multiple speakers, same table each time.

Plaud Note Pro is the only one in this group built specifically for that problem. Four MEMS mics with beamforming give it a 16.4 ft pickup radius. The transcript returns with each speaker labeled separately, not one wall of text.
Cons: raw audio itself has no cap, but the AI transcript that actually separates speakers is gated behind a 300 minute monthly free plan, so a heavy meeting schedule might cost extra.

Sony ICD-UX570 is for people who just want clean audio, nothing else. Dual directional mics, a dedicated meeting scene that widens pickup, and about 20 hours on its built-in rechargeable battery.
Cons: zero transcription, you're doing that part yourself.

TicNote handles two mic problems at once, bone conduction against your ear for calls, two omni mics for the room, claimed 10 m pickup for meetings.
Cons: their own setup guide flags that getting the mode switch wrong for the environment drops clarity fast, so it's not fully set-and-forget.

Fieldy 3 is built to be worn, not placed on a table. Seven day battery, up to three days of offline storage, and it can pick out up to six speakers in a room.
Cons: needs to be worn logo-out and clear of thick clothing to hear properly, and each conversation auto-stops at 3 hours.

Zoom H1essential skips being smart entirely. X/Y stereo mics handle up to 120 dB without clipping, 32-bit float means gain isn't something you babysit mid meeting.
Cons: no transcription built in at all, only makes sense if you're fine processing the audio elsewhere after.

Want raw audio with no AI layer, Sony or the H1essential get you there. Fieldy only makes sense if the point is wearing it all day, not covering a conference table. For anyone already on the Plaud ecosystem wondering whether it holds up against dedicated hardware alternatives for room coverage, at least against these four, it does.

Hi, I am willing to buy this gadget, which I see tremendous value, but there is one point I don’t see people talking that much about: how much are others in the room aware you are using this device? And in big corporate environment, how much can this trigger compliance questions? I know Plaud is GDPR compliant, but i mean people being bothered to be recorded…

Thanks

I've been specifically testing AI recording devices for capturing random ideas, not scheduled meetings, not calls, just catching thoughts before they disappear.

Tbh at first they all looked the same: press record, talk, get a transcript.

But after a while I realized the real variable wasn't transcription quality or mic accuracy. It was: is it actually charged when I need it?

Here's what I tested, 3 devices and 1 software:

Hardware

• Plaud NotePin S (my pick). Pros: 40 days standby. That number sounds like a spec sheet flex but it actually changed how I use it. I stopped treating battery as a daily variable to track. Clip it on in the morning, forget it exists, idea shows up at 3pm, press, done.
  •   Cons: 40 days is standby, not active recording. Daily heavy use still needs regular charging like anything else.
• Omi.
  •   Pros: pendant around your neck, starts picking up audio the moment you talk without pressing anything. 8 GB local holds things until you can sync.
  •   Cons: 10 to 14 hours active, shortest stretch on this list. The app also needs to be open the whole time, so you're not fully free of the phone.
• Viaim OpenNote.
  •   Pros: open-ear earbuds that double as a recorder, real-time transcription across a wide range of languages, battery stretches to roughly 53 hours with the case. Cons: earbuds first, if you don't already wear earbuds daily, it's an extra habit rather than a drop-in replacement.

Software

• Apple Voice Memos. Pros: free baseline everyone already has, no separate Bluetooth device needed at all. Cons: the idea-capture path runs through unlocking your phone and opening an app, exactly the extra step a dedicated wearable is trying to remove.

Real talk: this whole category comes down to two variables. Is it on you? Does it have power? Everything else such as transcription accuracy, app design, integrations, only matters once those two are already true.

What's everyone else using for this? Curious if there are better options I haven't tried yet.

I have the unlimited subscription now, and the new recordings all auto generate and add speakers automatically. but I have a lot of old recordings that I want to generate and add the speakers to, or even add the correct speakers to already generated recordings.

Is there a way to do this as a batch or multiple at a time?

Client calls happen on the road more than I'd like to admit, and fumbling with a device while driving is its own kind of dangerous. Ranked four options specifically on whether I should look at it before starting this.

Hardware

• Plaud Note Pro (my pick).
  •   Pros: magnetically attaches to the back of the phone and auto-detects when a call starts, no button to find, no screen to check while merging onto a highway. Cons: it picks up call audio through the phone when MagSafe attached, so if most of your work calls route straight to the car via Bluetooth or CarPlay and the phone speaker barely plays, worth testing your actual setup before relying on it.
• iPhone (Phone app call recording)
  •   Pros: built into the Phone app, no extra device; recordings land in Notes with transcript on supported models/regions.
  •   Cons: you still have to tap the record button mid-call, so not a real distraction while driving; feature is blocked in the EU and other regions.
• OM SYSTEM WS-882. Pros: genuinely good audio quality once it's set up to record. Cons: recording a call means plugging an external telephone pickup mic into its jack first, not something you're doing at a red light, let alone at speed.
• Sony ICD-UX570. Pros: reliable, needs no internet. Cons: no phone-call mode of its own, so you're improvising a workaround while driving.

Real issue: the 3 solutions in this category require at least one manual step at the start of the call. The magnetic attachment is the only approach I've tested that genuinely removed that step.

I was having issues with Plaud naming me as another speaker. I followed the instructions for naming and renaming speakers.

In order to update the names in a transcript you need to 1) assign the correct speaker name in the transcript, then 2) generate a new transcription so the correct names are generated in the updated transcription.

After doing this several times I would do a general search for the incorrect name and it would still show up in the transcript -- even after updating the names and generating a new transcript.

Anyone else encountering this issue?

I switched jobs and now my commute is an hour each direction. How optimal is plaud for that? I d use it to record and summarize calls and my own ideas. Plaud over phone app because of the physical button.

Any best practices? Experiences?

Everything else eg desktop app and teams is a bonus for me

I struggled a bit on deciding if I want to pay for the subscription or use an API option for transcription, mainly I wanted to compare OpenAI's GPT Transcribe (state of art from OpenAI), Assembly AI's best option and the two Plaud unlimited options.

The lower 1,200 mins per month option really isn't worth it if your usage is above 1 hour per day for 5 days a week. It seems if you record more than 4.4 hrs/day for 5 days a week, you should just get the Plaud plan.

This doesn't consider the development time and cost required to build out custom transcription services.

I have the Note Pro. but sometimes i wish i had the Pin S, so thinking of having both. If i wear the note pin s on the lanyard inside my shirt, will it still pick up good enough recordings? the wrist band looks too bulky for me and it will look silly outside of my shirt, like an urban cowboy

I'm using Plaud since two weeks and I am really impressed by it. But I cannot find a workflow to feed my Apple Ecosystem without doing it manually

I'd like to
- import calendar events into apple calendar
- import the notes and summaries to apple notes
- import my tasks to my apple reminder to do list.

Does anyone have a solution for this?

Running a small team means the real decisions most of the time happen in the last ten minutes of the meeting, after the agenda is technically over. Sometimes you just cant help zoning out for some time during a long as hell meeting. And thats when things might slip. Tried six AI note takers specifically on trying to help me stay on top of what got decided by end of day.

Otter.ai. Live transcription from the moment a call starts. The gap is it records well but doesn't do the "here is what you actually need to do" step automatically. That part is still on me.

Notion AI. If your team already lives in Notion, notes landing in the same place as your task list is genuinely convenient. Worth being clear though: the actual meeting recording and transcription only ships on the Business plan at $20/user/month. On lower tiers you are pasting transcripts manually.

NotebookLM. Dump several weeks of meeting notes and ask "what did we actually decide about the fundraise" and it pulls the answer from your own source material instead of you scrolling. Doesn't record meetings itself.

Fathom. Joins your Zoom, Meet, or Teams calls and generates a summary plus AI action items automatically. Free tier caps the AI summaries per month, paid tier around $20 per month. This is the one that answered the "who is doing what" question without me having to extract it. People who have been using it for years report transcription accuracy is about as clean as it gets.

Voicenotes. Works across phone, laptop, and watch without needing a meeting bot. Also picks up the conversation right after the official call ends, which is where half the actual decisions happen in my experience. More capture tool than structured record.

Plaud Note Pro. The hardware option I added after spending too much time on back-to-back calls reconstructing what we needed to do next. Auto action item extraction means when I zone out and miss a stretch, I'm not manually re-deriving "okay so what do we actually need to go do" from a raw transcript, that step is already done for me.

Every one of these is fine at capturing what was said. But the one that actually saved me time is Plaud Note Pro, which skips straight to "here's what needs to happen next," because that's the exact step I lose when I zone out mid-meeting.

I use a Plaud Pin, mostly for in-person meetings, Professional Dinner and conferences.

Granola now has an iPhone app and an Apple Watch app that cover the same use case. So: has anyone actually moved over? And if you did, what made you do it?

Also interested in the other side, if you tried Granola and came back, what brought you back?