The Plaud recorder and this app have in tandem changed the way I get my thoughts from my brain into reality. I occasionally use it for meetings and phone calls as it is mostly advertised, but the vast majority of use is completely personal. The ability to start recording with the start of a physical button and have it be transcribed and summarized by AI is something I have BEGGED for constantly over the last decade. This is without a doubt the best product I have ever encountered for that purpose. Let me be clear. There are some issues with Plaud. The cost is quite high. The charger is obscure and hard to source if lost. It sometimes takes a couple tries to get recordings going. But as a whole, if you are like me and desperate to get fleeting thoughts from your head into your phone with as little friction as possible, there is simply nothing superior to Plaud available. I hope to see updates in the future which improve the software, firmware, and app-side of this tool. Until then, I will be a power user of this life-changing resource.

I have used this not only in meetings that are one on one or larger in person, but with Webinars and recently my first online Retreat. The results captured every moment helping me to analyze this data in many ways. Because the transcripts are very clean with minor missed-interpreted words, as an author, I have begun using PLAUD to verbally tell my stories and get the best translation that is the most precise through the transcript feature. My stories get written much faster with limited editing compared to a voice recorder being translated through another app to produce the transcript I haven’t yet seen this level of verbal transcription accuracy. I found my use of Plaud in a fashion different than I originally thought. I never realized how many ways in which Plaud can be used. I originally got it to help me with my notes as a secretary of our business meetings. But Plaud’s versatility keeps me amazed.

The PLAUD app and hardware work quite well. The microphone is nice and sensitive, but I question the necessity of the hardware, especially if Apple plans to integrate AI into the iPhone's operating system. One issue I encountered is that exporting recorded audio files in MP3 or other formats does not seem to work. I assume this is a bug that will be fixed, as the website handles it fine. The hardware performs very well and can be separated from the phone, allowing for long recording sessions. I tried using the ChatGPT app directly with its built-in recorder, but it would cut out after about three minutes of recording. For this reason alone, the PLAUD hardware seems superior. Interestingly, if I take the text file generated by PLAUD and input it into ChatGPT, it outlines as well as the PLAUD app. Overall, I give this a high rating of four out of five for its capabilities. However, its usefulness may decline with the potential inclusion of better audio recording capabilities in ChatGPT and the iOS operating system.