Earlier this year, AI hardware companies were all the buzz. There were smart pins meant to replace your phone; pendants intended to replace your friends; dongles that were supposed to remember everything you saw and saw; and whole bunch of other stuff that was announced and never came out. Some were outrageously expensive; others, like the Rabbit R1, were concerningly cheap. Yet all shared one thing in common: they were terrible.

Large language models are extremely useful, and AI-enabled hardware will become more and more common, but LLMs aren’t quite up to snuff yet, and these devices weren’t built well enough to counter their issues.

One AI device was pretty good, though, partly because it was so simple. The Plaud Note has one button, one toggle, one small light, and no screen, and all it does is record audio. You put it on the back of your phone, on a desk, or hold it in your hand, and it can record calls, conversations, and memos for you, which it then transcribes for you to read on your phone or laptop.

As I wrote in my review, I had no issue with the device — which I still regularly use for recording phone calls — but the software required a subscription, and, more importantly, the software experience didn’t fit the device. The Note was perfect for quick voice memos, but the software was far better set up for long conversations and calls, where it could summarise and present the information usefully for you, and using it for memos was more bothersome than helpful.

Considering that you can record and transcribe audio natively on Google Pixel phones — no subscription required — the added fee and inconvenience of a separate device didn’t seem worth it.

Thankfully, though, Plaud has taken this feedback into account. There is a subscription for power users, but most will get enough transcription through their standard plan, and the app is smoother and easier to navigate. And with their new device, the Plaud NotePin, they’ve made a device better suited to their software. And it’s great.

Much like the original Note, the NotePin is refreshingly simple. It hangs from your neck like a pendant — or pins to your shirt through a magnet or clip, or goes around your wrist on a bracelet, courtesy of the stylish accessory kit — and has a single touch surface on the front, with a little light to show it’s status, and that’s it. It’s best worn regularly, turned off; and then, holding your finger to it, and feeling a haptic vibration in response, you start recording the audio around you.

Whether you’re talking on a speaker phone or in person, the NotePin will record the conversation and then upload it to their AI servers, where your dialogue is transcribed, summarised, and sorted by speaker. The audio quality is mediocre, and there are transcription errors, but it’s also simple, easy to use, and gets the important information down, even when other clothes slightly cover the pin. More importantly, it’s just incredible to use and quite unlike anything else.

Used regularly, it’s your daily digital stenographer, jotting down all the info said by your doctor or a family member’s discussions of Christmas plans; and if you can’t remember what someone told you, just check the transcript, read it from the summary, or use the “Ask AI” feature to find the information for you. I’ve even been using it when watching movies or TV shows, letting me quickly find a fantastic quote to use later, and the battery lasts long enough that you don’t have to worry about it. It can transcribe for about four hours at a time, letting you forget you’ve turned it on without worry, and when you’re getting low, just put it on the stylish charging puck.

It’s not flawless. The software is clunkier and less stylish than I’d like; it’s still not good at quick thoughts and memos, and I wish you could select, by default, for Plaud to auto-transcribe the file and provide a generic summary rather than requiring you to choose to do this for every single recording. Also, the free tier provides more than enough for the average user, but power users probably will be frustrated that the paid tier isn’t closer to a full-blooded Otter or MeetGeek alternative.

Yet Plaud continues to improve their software, and the NotePin is held back far less by it than the initial Note; both because of the improvements and because this suits long recordings far better. I loved the Note but couldn’t reasonably recommend it. With the NotePin, that isn’t true anymore. It feels and looks premium, provides something that no other device can, and does so exceptionally well. For $169, to me, it’s more than worth it.