Plaud Note Pro vs NotePin S: Which AI Note Taker to Buy (30 Day Review)

So for the past month, I've had an AI recorder with me in basically every meeting, every call, and every brainstorm. And sometimes it was this little card in my pocket, sometimes it was a pin clipped to my shirt, or on my wrist like this. And the promise of this kind of technology is pretty simple. It's just stop taking notes, be fully present in every conversation, and let AI capture, transcribe, and summarize everything on your behalf. Now these are the Plod Note Pro and the PLAUD Note Pin S. Now PLAUD sent both of these products to me and now I want to share my honest take after a few weeks of really using this and I've used all of the AI recorders so I'm going to give you my take on the good and the not so good. And by the end of this video you will know exactly what these do whether an AI note taker actually fits your life and if it does which of these products you should buy. That's going to be the video let's go. So let's take a look at the actual hardware. So Plod makes a few devices. I've been testing their two current flagships. That's the Note Pro. It's about the size of a credit card. It weighs about an ounce. And it just disappears into a pocket, right, as far as storage goes. It has an aluminum build. It has a little display on the front that shows the recording status at a glance. And then four microphones that PLAUD says can pick up voices clearly from over 16 feet away. And then it also comes with a magnetic case and a ring so you can stick it on the back of your phone, which matters for a feature that i'm going to show you in a minute and then this is the Note Pin S, it's the wearable one so it's tiny it's way under an ounce and it comes with four different ways to wear it a magnetic pin number one a clip number two a lanyard and a wristband and there's a physical record button on it so you press it you feel the click and you're recording you don't need a phone an app there's no fumbling and now both of these devices have 64 gigabytes of storage both record a full workday and then some on a charge and both feed into the same PLAUD app, which is where most of the magic happens. That's what I want to get into next. And before we jump more into these demos, if you do want to support the channel and follow along, check out the specs of these products and go to a link in the description below or comment PLAUD under this video. And that said, let's get into the core experience. So as far as what using these actually looks like, and this is really where PLAUD earns its money or doesn't for you. Number one, there is recording and highlighting, so starting a recording is one press on the Note Pro, the display lights up, you can see it's live, that's actually really nice, it removes the kind of "is this thing on" anxiety, and then when something important gets said you press once to highlight that exact moment, so instead of the AI guessing what mattered that you're telling it and then those highlights show up marked in the transcript later. So you have the kind of human in the loop. That's something we talk about a lot on this channel where I think more AI products should work this way. And then we shift to transcription. So once you're done, the recording syncs to the app and gets transcribed with speaker labels. So you know who said what. It supports over 100 languages for translation. And in my testing, the accuracy is pretty strong across the board. I've done some brand names and technical terms and then you get to summaries and templates, this kind of part, and this is the part where those recordings become much more useful and what you're going to get are structured summaries, and there's thousands of templates depending on what the recording was: meeting notes, action items interview breakdowns even mind maps to-do lists and then under the hood all of that runs on the leading state-of-the-art AI models for the summary quality is what you would get based on the transcript it can be checked, it would be a PLAUD, except it's automatic and then it's organized. Then this is a pretty cool feature. You can also chat with your recording so you can ask what was decided, pull out a number, for example, that was mentioned or have it draft, say, a follow-up email based on a call. And that follow-up email kind of demo or merging your notes into action items and actually executing on those action items, to me, is the strongest pitch for the whole product. that's 10, 20, 30 plus minutes of post-meeting admin and gone. So that's cool. We can look more at that later and then we can think about call recording. So one thing the Note Pro specifically does well are phone calls. You can stick it to the back of your phone with the magnetic ring and it will automatically switch into call mode and capture both sides of the conversation and then figure out on its own whether it's recording a call or a loop. And I think the pattern across all of this technology is just less kind of splitting attention, right? More being present in the conversation and just having the note-taking and the reporting go to the background. And the next phase that we're just starting to see across the Aspon and the other AI systems that work here is extending that background work and reporting into actually doing useful work for you. Now, of course, no product is perfect. This category does have caveat so i want to shift into that next first is the subscriptions the device comes with a free plan that includes about 300 transcription minutes a month that sounds like a lot in practice that's more like five or six meetings so if you record daily you will need a paid plan so you have to factor that into the real cost of ownership not just cost a month of now second is consent this is on you it's not on the device but if you're recording people tell them that is the law in a of places including one party versus two-party consent states here in the us but beyond the legal side that's just the right way to operate and people generally are fine with it just like they're fine with no paper and ai's involved currently but you do want to add that little kind of conversational piece into your daily conversations if you are wearing a recorder all day and then finally the ai is only as good as the meeting right so a tight call that has a clear agenda and is going to produce at the end of the day a great summary right a brainstorm that's all kind of over the place will produce a summary that's all over the place so the AI will organize but the input has to be there to be maximally useful for you so which of these products should you go for I think you should get the Note Pro if your work life kind of runs on phone calls and scheduled meetings because the call recording alone is going to be a big value add for you plus the longer microphone range for conference rooms and the display, it is the most or the more capable device overall, and the one I would be more inclined to hand to professionals. Now, if your important conversations and ideas happen on the move, I think that's where you want the Note Pro So like walking on a job site, working with conference or in-person interviews, if you're on your feet all day, that's kind of the whole value add here. it's wearable and it's one button press away for recording and intelligence so after testing this for me personally my personal pick or inclination is the Note Pro because i'm on calls a lot of the time versus more being up and walking around but again i think which one of these to go for more so depends on where your conversations and work life happens now pricing wise the Note Pro runs about $189 and the Note Pin S around $179 and both are on sale pretty frequently around $160. Now, if you do want to support the channel and buy it through one of our links, you can do that at the link in the description or comment PLAUD. Now, if you want to support the channel, you can visit plaud.ai or the link in the description and use code JOHN10 for 10% off. Again, you can help support the channel and that is plaud.ai there you go that is a month with PLAUD hope you guys learned about this hardware and where these wearable AI technologies are going pretty cool to see i think there's a whole world out there that we're just starting to get into and with that in mind i will see you in the next one cheers