We’ve seen plenty of audio recorders before, which make it easy to record voice notes, interviews, and presentations. The iZyrec Plaud Note, however, takes the voice recorder to the next level by integrating automatic transcriptions, summaries, and more, allowing you to instantly access the information in easy-to-digest formats.
That’s right, you no longer have to manually listen to every minute of every recording in order to transcribe or summarize them, as the device’s companion app can do all that on its own. Even better, it can put it into any format of your liking, from summary notes and mind maps to lists and more.
The iZyrec Plaud Note is a compact device about half the size of a modern smartphone, measuring just 3.4 x 2.1 x 0.12 inches (height x width x thickness). Because of these proportions, it can be snapped conveniently onto the back of a smartphone (it barely adds any thickness), allowing you to keep it wherever you keep your handheld essential. Of course, you can just keep it separate, as the size makes it ideal for slipping inside a shirt’s chest pocket. There are only two controls on the device, a switch and a concave button next to it, so it’s very clean and uncluttered.
The switch allows you to swap between the device’s two recording modes. With the switch turned up, it activates the vibration conduction sensor (VCS), which monitors the phone’s vibrations to pick up sound coming from the phone, allowing you to easily record phone conversations. That’s right, this voice recorder can capture audio from your phone without having to plug into a port or pair with it over Bluetooth. Turn down the switch to activate normal recording, which turns on the air conduction sensor to capture clear audio of sound from its surroundings, essentially turning it into a standard voice recorder.
The iZyrec Plaud Note will start and stop recording with just a press of the button, allowing you to quickly commence audio capture in a jiffy. It uses two Knowles Sisonic mics to capture DVD-quality sound up to 1536 kbps, by the way, which it puts through an AI-powered denoising algorithm to clean up any unwanted sounds, giving you clean and precise audio recording with high-frequency details. All recordings are saved in the onboard 64GB of storage, which, the outfit claims, is enough to let you keep up to 480 hours’ worth of audio capture files, while the built-in battery allows for up to 30 hours’ worth of audio capture between charges.
Of course, the big selling point here is the AI transcription and summary capabilities that the companion app brings to the mix. It integrates OpenAI’s Whisper service, which can transcribe audio recordings into precise, time-coded texts with human-level accuracy. The AI talents don’t stop there, either, as it also leverages OpenAI’s ChatGPT to turn those transcriptions into summaries, with the option to get it formatted as meeting notes, mind maps, lists, and diaries, depending on which one you require. Do note, using the AI features will require a recurring subscription cost of $9.99 per month.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the iZyrec Plaud Note. You can reserve a unit for pledges starting at $99.