While there’s a lot of debate over how much AI will soon impact different industries, perhaps one job you won’t mind it taking is the tedious role of note-taking and transcribing. Now, a handy new gadget from iZYREC, which has previously released recording hardware, is the focus of a Kickstarter campaign.
The lightweight aluminum-bodied Plaud Note is just 0.12-inches (under 3-mm) thick and snaps to the back of an iPhone or Android phone. With a flick of a switch, it can instantly record calls. While it’s not the first to offer this functionality, it is, however, forging the way in boosting it by adding ChatGPT to serve as a personal assistant for your audio.
The company claims it to be the world’s most advanced voice recorder, which uses its own Plaud phone app to provide voice-to-text transcription, automated summaries, meeting notes, to-do lists and handy mind maps to save a whole lot of time and effort.
To record calls, simply toggle a switch to turn on the Vibration Conduction Sensor (VCS), which clearly captures everyone on the line. Toggle the switch again and you’ll be recording the audio around you, which is designed for meetings, appointments you’d like a transcript of and in-person lectures.
It uses two Knowles SiSonic microphones, which offer DVD-quality sound up to 1,536 kbps, while SVE Call Solution filters noise for better playback.
However, the real gem here is the OpenAI Whisper incorporation, which turns your talk to text, precisely offering time-coded transcriptions of anything you record. Don’t want the whole transcript? No problem, ChatGPT will provide you with summaries in just five seconds.
Plaud Note also packs a power punch, with 30 hours of continuous recording two months of standby juice. It can also store 480 hours of recordings in its 64-GB body.
The Plaud Note pledge packages start at US$99 during the campaign (retailing at $159 after), with one month AI membership thrown in to sweeten the deal (see what's included below). The company is due to start shipping the product in September 2023.
While the audio is filtered into the Plaud App, offering 10,000 minutes of cloud storage in the first three years for free, you’ll need a subscription to unlock the ChatGPT features. For $9.90 per month, subscribers will get 600 minutes stored, transcriptions in 57 languages and unlimited ChatGPT functions, such as the summarizing, to-do lists, mind maps and more.
Right now, however, you can get 13 months of AI membership for $39.90 (12 months plus the one month free that comes with the device).
Also, keep in mind that, legally, recording phone calls in some US states require all parties to be privy to it. These states are California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington. Elsewhere, one-party notification means just you, the one party, needs to know. Laws differ around the globe, so check your region; Plaud Note ships worldwide.
To see how the Plaud Note recorder works, check out the video below.
Source: Kickstarter