Plaud’s NotePin is an AI wearable for summarizing meetings and taking voice notes

After creating an impressive AI-powered voice recorder (which also became famous on TikTok), Plaud is launching a more ambitious gadget: a wearable designed to be your constant companion, recording your notes and meetings and helping you get things done. The device is called NotePin, and the line of pill-shaped gadgets and accessories seems to take inspiration from the first Fitbits. You can wear the NotePin around your neck like a pendant, clip it to your chest, strap it to your wrist, or hang it pretty much anywhere.

Smart wearables are now ubiquitous and fall into two categories. There are companion devices, like Friend, which are simply meant to provide a place to hang out and talk to. Then there are productivity devices, like Limitless, which are designed to be useful rather than enjoyable.

The NotePin falls more into the latter camp: Plaud positions it as a way to transcribe, summarize, and extract metrics from everything that happens in your life. Its battery lasts up to 20 hours of continuous recording, according to the company, but Plaud doesn’t plan on it being always on—you have to tap the device first to start recording, rather than just setting it and forgetting it. It’s a good user interface and also a good privacy practice, both for users and for the world at large; these devices raise complex questions about who consents to being recorded, and requiring manual action solves at least part of the problem.

Plaud’s first product, the Note voice recorder, is one of the best AI voice note-taking tools on the market. The Note is designed to attach to the back of your phone and record voice notes or phone calls, then automatically transcribe and summarize them. Plaud’s app is a bit clunky, but the core technology works pretty well. The NotePin’s main improvement is its form factor: Plaud hopes that by taking the device out of your pocket and placing it on your body, you’ll have more reasons to use it.

The NotePin itself costs $169, and Plaud’s AI features are free for the most basic uses and $79 per year for more advanced things like summary templates and speaker tagging. (Presumably, anyone interested in buying this device will want the pro features.) The software will ultimately be what matters: The rise of AI seems to mean that a lot more people will start recording a lot more of their lives, and it will be up to Plaud and its competitors to figure out what to do with all that information. Perfect memory is a seductive thing, but it’s awfully hard to achieve.