PLAUD

PLAUD is a voice-recorder brand built around a credit-card-sized note taker: the device records ambient sound, or attaches to a phone through a magnetic case to capture calls, and the companion app transcribes, labels speakers and writes summaries. The vendor's spec sheet lists dimensions of 3.37 by 2.13 by 0.12 inches, a weight of 1.06 ounces, a 400mAh battery, BLE 5.2 and Wi-Fi, two MEMS microphones plus one VPU and 64GB of storage; on the software side it claims transcription in 112 languages with speaker diarisation, custom vocabulary and multidimensional summaries, and it says its Plaud Intelligence layer runs on leading third-party models rather than its own.

It suits people who record conversations all day and would rather carry a dedicated device than open an app — sales, consulting, legal, healthcare and education are the fields the vendor's own use-case pages name — and it suits anyone who wants capture to happen without a laptop on the table or a bot joining the meeting. It suits less well a desktop-first workflow where software on the same machine already does the job, and it suits less well anyone who has not costed the recurring half: the hardware is a one-off, the transcription allowance is not.

Not verified: no device was used, so recording quality, battery performance and the 112-language accuracy claim are unmeasured, and the vendor's headline lines — the number-one brand claim and an estimate of 260 hours saved per year — are marketing, with the vendor's own footnote calling the second an estimate. Plan names and allowances (a free tier of 300 transcription minutes a month, a Pro tier of 1,200, and an unlimited tier) were read from the vendor's pages on the day of writing and should be re-checked; the pricing page opened on 2026-10-12 lists Pro at $17.99 a month, or $8.33 a month billed annually, Unlimited at $29.99 a month, or $19.99 a month billed annually, and Team at $28 per user a month, or $20 per user a month billed annually, rising to $35 and $25 after an offer ending 30 November 2026, marked as the US store in US dollars; no checkout was opened. Whether recordings are processed on the device or in PLAUD's cloud, and where that data is kept, was not examined.