The new Plaud Note Pro deploys AI to transform the spoken word into searchable data

The latest piece of AI-powered note-taking technology has arrived from Plaud.ai. The new Plaud Note Pro goes straight to the top of the San Francisco-based company’s technology tree, above the recent NotePin and the original Note voice recorder. Following the same form factor as the latter, the newer device promises an AI-based approach to sifting through voice notes and call and meeting recordings to extract the finer points of conversation.

A finely detailed piece of industrial design, the tiny Note Pro is credit card-sized and barely any thicker. Supplied with a leather wallet and magnetically attachable USB-C charge cable, the chief innovation is the introduction of a 1-inch screen that indicates recording status. Made from Gorilla Glass and aluminium, the Note Pro is less than 3mm thick, with a rippling design that’s elegant and discreet.

Further upgrades include a better audio reach thanks to more microphones than the original Note and the ability to continuously record for 50 hours (versus 30 hours in the original). Onboard storage tops out at 64GB and there is also 75 days’ worth of standby battery life. For the first time, the company has also included Apple Find My support to help track lost devices. All this is impressive, but the Note Pro is nothing without a connection to the cloud.

Plaud.ai’s model is based on using existing LLMs (large language models) to process its beautifully captured data, with a bespoke app that handles the cloud uploading and subsequent transcript and/or summary. Out of the box, the Note Pro will work, but the company hopes that power users and big companies will shell out to get access to faster and more efficient AI models. The new hardware and software helps – the Note Pro contains ‘studio grade’ recording hardware and noise isolation algorithms and can automatically detect whether a conversation is a phone call or in-person, for example.

Given the device’s reliance on the app, you could be forgiven for wondering what the point of the physical hardware is at all, given that most smartphones offer access to similar functionality. Cleverly, the Note Pro is effectively asking you to hold two contradictory notions at the same time. The first is the intentionality that a separate physical device can give to a task, just like how a standalone digital camera can help focus the eye on image-making, despite the better sensor and power of your smartphone. The little Note Pro can also connect to your phone to record calls.

The second is the idea that you should succumb to the warm embrace of AI-driven processes. Now we're not suggesting that Plaud's computational abilities bear any relationship to the fiendish combination of brilliance and the ability to erase culture that generative AI has achieved. Instead, there's a case for arguing that this 'soft' use of the results gleaned from processing vast caches of data is one area where 'AI' works rather well. Plaud Intelligence, the company’s cloud-based service, can do an awful lot, not least its ability to support the transcription of 112 languages.

Transcripts come labelled with individual speakers, thanks to the company’s proprietary way of recording audio data and separating speakers. Most importantly of all, your personal Plaud Intelligence database will grow in sophistication over time, taking notes, visuals and voices and ‘weaving them together across time and context’.

For those whose livelihood relies heavily on tracking who said what and when, the idea of the Note Pro is tempting, especially the ability to off-load great chunks of the working week into a perpetual, ever-evolving database of liability. There are use cases everywhere, including journalism of course, but Plaud’s CEO Nathan Xu, who founded the company in 2021, started off in investment banking. Unsurprisingly, it's in the high-stakes worlds of finance and law where such a device could prove itself to be invaluable.

Pro users will be able to access over 2,000 dedicated templates, many of which have been tailored specifically for meetings and projects in particular industries, from healthcare to law and education. Xu describes Note Pro as ‘not just a note taker, [but] a thinking partner that brings structure, clarity and actionability to everyday conversations’.

To get the most of Plaud Note Pro, you really have to go all in; there are no half measures with this kind of AI-powered information buffet. Sure, you can get an effective transcription from Google Recorder or Apple Notes, and many iterations of common online meeting applications will also summarise and present minutes. Short of a back-to-back comparison, there's no saying whether Plaud beats its rivals in accuracy or speed. However, dipping in and out of a machine-generated transcript is very different to having months of boardroom discussions uploaded, precisely minuted, analysed and scoured for ‘action points’.

Nevertheless, this impressive piece of hardware design feels yoked to AI’s signature verbosity. As a test, I recorded family discussions about a night out on the town. ‘No formal decisions or outcomes were established,’ the Plaud App concluded at the end of its summary, which also noted that it was ‘an informal conversation that touched on several disconnected personal topics’.

These notes, with their analysis and ‘mind map’ diagram, were also substantially longer than the original transcript. Just as you know when someone has padded out a pitch or an email with unwanted AI-generated cruft, the Plaud App won’t necessarily provide a straightforward shortcut in the everyday working environment.

Certain professions – and people – thrive on words rather than actions – this is where the Plaud Note Pro would be in its element. AI proponents might promise a future shaped by labour-saving, but as the Plaud Note Pro so neatly demonstrates, a casual over-reliance on the technology has a habit of generating even more data to digest.

Plaud Note Pro, £169, Plaud Intelligence subscription extra, shipping late September 2025, Plaud.ai, Plaud_official