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Plaud has announced its latest wearable voice recording device, the NotePin S, positioning it as a compact AI-powered note-taking solution aimed at professionals who need to capture conversations throughout their working day. The capsule-sized device weighs just 17.4 grams without its magnetic pin accessory and comes bundled with four different wearing options, allowing users to clip, pin, hang, or strap the recorder to their clothing or wrist.
The San Francisco-headquartered company, which operates offices across several global locations including Singapore, Tokyo, Shenzhen, Seattle, and Beijing, has built the NotePin S around what it calls Plaud Intelligence, an AI platform that handles transcription, summarisation, and contextual analysis of recorded audio.
Hardware Specifications and Design
The NotePin S measures 51 x 21 x 11mm, making it roughly the size of a large vitamin capsule. At its core are two MEMS microphones capable of capturing audio from distances up to three metres, which Plaud claims delivers clear recording quality across various meeting environments. The device uses a physical tactile button for operation, with a long press starting and stopping recordings, while a short press during recording creates a highlighted timestamp.
Battery life stands at 20 hours of continuous recording, with standby time extending to 40 days between charges. Internal storage capacity reaches 64GB, which should accommodate numerous hours of recorded conversations before requiring transfer to the companion app. Charging requires a dedicated dock that connects via USB-C, and users must remove the magnetic pin accessory before placing the device in its charging cradle.
Three colour options are available at launch: black, silver, and purple. The company has also confirmed that Apple Find My integration is coming soon, which will help users locate their device if misplaced.
Included Accessories
Rather than selling wearing accessories separately, Plaud has bundled four options with every NotePin S purchase. The magnetic clip attaches to jacket lapels or shirt collars without requiring any pin-based fastening, while the traditional pin mount offers a more secure attachment through clothing fabric. A lanyard option allows the device to hang around the neck, keeping it accessible for quick recording starts, and a wristband mount provides an alternative for users who prefer wrist-worn devices.
This approach addresses one of the practical challenges with wearable recorders: ensuring users actually wear them consistently enough to capture the conversations they need. By including multiple mounting options, Plaud appears to be betting that users will find at least one comfortable configuration for all-day wear.
Plaud Intelligence: The Software Platform
The hardware serves primarily as a capture device, with the heavy lifting performed by Plaud Intelligence, the company’s cloud-based AI platform. This system handles several key functions that transform raw audio into structured, searchable content.
Transcription Capabilities
The transcription engine supports 112 languages and uses what Plaud describes as a combination of Whisper Large V3 and Azure speech recognition models. Speaker labelling automatically identifies different voices in a conversation, attributing text to named speakers once they have been identified. Users can also create custom vocabulary lists to improve accuracy for industry-specific terminology, product names, or proper nouns that might otherwise be misrecognised.
Multimodal Input
Beyond audio recording, the Plaud app supports what the company terms multimodal input. During or after a recording session, users can add typed notes, capture images of whiteboards or presentation slides, and create audio highlights by pressing the device button at key moments. All these inputs are time-aligned in a unified timeline, allowing the AI to incorporate visual and textual context when generating summaries.
This approach acknowledges that meetings and conversations often involve more than just spoken words. A whiteboard sketch or a displayed slide might provide crucial context that audio alone cannot capture.
Multidimensional Summaries
One of the more ambitious features is what Plaud calls multidimensional summaries. Rather than producing a single summary document, the system can generate multiple summary formats from a single recording, each tailored to different purposes. Action items might be extracted for sales follow-ups, data and insights compiled for managers, or strategic overviews prepared for leadership review.
The platform includes over 10,000 pre-built templates spanning various professional scenarios, and users can create custom templates suited to their specific workflows. Summary generation can occur automatically through the AutoFlow feature, which handles transcription and summarisation without manual intervention and can even deliver results directly to email.
Ask Plaud
The Ask Plaud feature functions as a conversational interface to recorded content. Users can pose natural language questions about their recordings, with the system providing answers drawn from transcribed content. These responses include references back to the original source material, allowing verification of any claims or facts. Smart suggestions help users discover relevant questions they might not have thought to ask, and any answer can be saved as a structured note for future reference.
A global search function extends this capability across all stored files, enabling users to find specific information mentioned across multiple recordings over time.
Desktop Application for Online Meetings
Recognising that professional conversations increasingly occur through video conferencing platforms, Plaud has developed a desktop application that extends recording capabilities to online meetings. Plaud Desktop automatically detects when users join calls on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and other platforms, capturing system audio without requiring a meeting bot to join the call.
This bot-free approach addresses a common complaint about AI meeting assistants, where visible bots can make participants uncomfortable or raise questions about recording consent. By capturing audio locally from the system output, Plaud Desktop avoids these issues while still providing transcription and summarisation through the same Plaud Intelligence platform.
The desktop application also supports multimodal capture, allowing users to take screenshots, type notes, and create audio highlights during online meetings, mirroring the functionality available when using the physical NotePin S device.
Data Security and Compliance
For enterprise users and professionals handling sensitive information, Plaud has pursued several security certifications. The platform holds GDPR compliance for European data protection requirements, HIPAA compliance for healthcare-related recordings, and SOC 2 Type II certification for service organisation controls. Additional certifications include ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 through Sensiba, along with EN18031 compliance.
Cloud synchronisation allows recordings to be accessed across the Plaud app, web interface, and desktop application, with unlimited storage available on paid subscription tiers.
Subscription Pricing Structure
While the enablement guide does not specify the hardware purchase price, it details three subscription tiers for the Plaud Intelligence AI services.
The Starter Plan is available at no cost and provides 300 minutes of transcription per month. This tier includes speaker labels, multimodal input, access to all 10,000 plus summary templates, custom template creation, the Ask Plaud feature, audio import capabilities, and sharing and export functions. Users on this tier can access the same LLM models as paid subscribers, including GPT-5.1, Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude Sonnet 4.
The Pro Plan costs $99.99 per year and increases the monthly transcription allowance to 1,200 minutes. All Starter Plan features are included, with the addition of smart audio trimming functionality.
The Unlimited Plan removes transcription limits entirely for $239.99 per year, providing unrestricted access to all platform capabilities.
All tiers include the same security certifications and compliance standards, ensuring that even free users benefit from enterprise-grade data protection.
Intended Use Cases
Plaud positions the NotePin S across several professional scenarios. Healthcare providers can use the device to capture patient consultations, generating accurate summaries that support better care decisions without requiring manual note-taking during appointments. Sales professionals can record client meetings to ensure no detail is missed, with AI-generated follow-up items helping to address specific client requirements.
Educators and trainers can record sessions for later review or to provide transcripts to participants. Engineers and project managers can capture site discussions and technical meetings, even in locations without network connectivity, with transcription and summarisation occurring once the device syncs with the companion app.
Creative professionals and digital nomads also feature in the company’s target audience, with the lightweight design and extended battery life supporting capture of ideas and conversations throughout the working day regardless of location.
Technical Operation
Using the NotePin S involves a straightforward workflow. A long press of approximately one second starts recording, confirmed by a single vibration. The indicator light near the microphone provides visual feedback on recording status. To end a recording, users apply another long press until they feel two vibrations.
During active recording, a short press creates a highlight marker at that moment in the timeline. These highlights appear in the app alongside any typed notes or captured images, helping users navigate to important moments when reviewing longer recordings.
First-time setup requires downloading the Plaud app and following on-screen instructions to pair the device via Bluetooth. Once bound to a user account, recordings sync automatically when the device is within Bluetooth range of the paired smartphone.
Comparison to the Product Category
Wearable voice recorders have existed for decades, but AI-powered transcription and summarisation represent a relatively recent evolution in the category. Several competing products offer similar functionality, though approaches vary in terms of form factor, AI capabilities, and ecosystem integration.
The NotePin S differentiates itself through its emphasis on multimodal input, the inclusion of all four wearing accessories in the box, and the integration with Plaud Desktop for online meeting capture. The availability of a functional free tier for transcription services also distinguishes it from competitors that require paid subscriptions from the outset.
Projects Feature Coming Later
The enablement guide mentions a Projects feature scheduled for launch in Q4 2025. This functionality will bring conversations, insights, context, and intelligence together within organised project containers, with automatic tagging, organisation, and searching. The feature appears aimed at users who need to track multiple ongoing work streams and want their recorded content organised accordingly.
Company Background
Plaud operates as a Delaware-registered company with its headquarters in San Francisco. The global office footprint spans six cities across the United States and Asia, suggesting significant resources behind the product development and support infrastructure.
The company’s stated mission is to amplify human intelligence, with a vision to build what it describes as the world’s most trusted AI work companion, targeting 50 million professionals by 2030. These are ambitious goals that will depend on both product execution and market reception over the coming years.
Availability
The NotePin S is available for purchase through Plaud’s website at plaud.ai. The enablement guide indicates this is a 2025 product launch, with the document itself marked with a 2025 copyright date. The device ships with all four wearing accessories, charging dock, USB-C cable, and quick start guide included in the box.
I am James, a UK-based tech enthusiast and the Editor and Owner of Mighty Gadget, which I’ve proudly run since 2007. Passionate about all things technology, my expertise spans from computers and networking to mobile, wearables, and smart home devices.
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