The software excels at dialogue recognition. I attended a remote lecture while prepping dinner, with the kitchen vent fan on, and Plaud’s software flawlessly extracted the speakers’ voices for transcription. Yet fact-checking the transcript and summary was tricky at best, as I found that the recording playback was almost impossible for me to make out.It allowed me to be more focused and present. In a separate test, I was blown away after Plaud accurately captured, transcribed, and summarized a four-person meeting in a crowded coffee shop with background music playing. But the best part was that by recording with the NotePin S rather than with my phone, I could remain present without worrying that an incoming call would pause recording or that a push alert would distract me.The automatic transcriptions are clutch. At first, the steps for using Plaud felt redundant — every time I recorded a session, I had to manually ask it to transcribe and summarize, too. (This isn’t the case with the transcription service Otter, for example, which automatically transcribes recordings for you.) But after I discovered Plaud’s AutoFlow, the process became much more instantaneous.The key is to use AutoFlow to trigger certain tasks. I created a trigger, for example, for Plaud to automatically transcribe a recording when it heard “welcome,” “webinar,” or “meeting” in the first 60 seconds and to summarize the session with my preferred notes template.I then set another trigger to automatically transcribe and summarize any new recording. To more easily find juicy quotes from an interview, I tapped the record button to “highlight” (Plaud’s term) the time in the audio recording. The template I chose prioritized the highlights I triggered, putting those important quotes front and center so that I wouldn’t have to search the entire transcript for them later.It uses a variety of AI platforms to pull off its seamless, accurate transcripts. Plaud repeatedly impressed me with the quality of its summaries and transcripts. The dual-microphone system in the NotePin S enhances voices and removes background noise, before Plaud turns the recordings from speech into text. Then it integrates with several generative-AI platforms (including Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Claude Sonnet 4.6, OpenAI GPT-5 and GPT-5.2, and Google Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 3.1 Pro), which produce the polished transcripts and summaries.Unfortunately, it doesn’t break down which AI service produced which results, though you can select a specific AI tool for Plaud to use if you have a strong preference.The templates can seem overwhelming — or redundant — if you don’t know what you need. Plaud boasts more than 10,000 templates for personalizing your transcription summaries of calls, interviews, lectures, meetings, and more. It also offers a healthy mix of industry-specific prompts for generative AIs to pull from.For example, a university-lecture prompt calls for summaries with subheadings to delineate main concepts and keywords, while a meeting summary prompt has sections for identified problems, feedback, and planned actions. I found the meeting prompts useful for recapping next steps after calls.You can also add context to the summaries by uploading images, say, of your handwritten notes or a graph projected on a screen. The AI can process that information as part of your final summary.The chatbot has great recall. Plaud provides a chatbot interface that can analyze the generated transcript and summary. When I couldn’t recall the name of a product mentioned during a pitch meeting, I asked Plaud, and it promptly scanned the call transcript and spit out the name, along with relevant follow-up questions. After a work meeting, when I asked it for a list of tasks, it gave me a chart with columns for the action item, the priority level, and the deadline that I could easily send to team members via a sharable link.The Plaud app partners with various generative-AI tools to provide transcription summaries and chatbot support. Kaitlyn Wells/NYT WirecutterThe Plaud app partners with various generative-AI tools to provide transcription summaries and chatbot support. Kaitlyn Wells/NYT WirecutterThe Plaud app partners with various generative-AI tools to provide transcription summaries and chatbot support. Kaitlyn Wells/NYT WirecutterPlaud’s privacy policies meet regulatory standards. Plaud says that it follows compliance standards set by several US, European, and voluntary global regulatory bodies, including EN 18031, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO/IEC 27001/27701, and SOC 2 Type 2. This means the device hardware is hardened against hackers, your privacy is protected and you have the right to delete your data, and any health discussions become protected records.Still, as someone who values safety, I worried about the privacy and security of the recordings. So I dug into Plaud’s and the AI companies’ privacy statements, interviewed Plaud representatives, and asked Wirecutter’s privacy and security writer Max Eddy to note any red flags in the company’s protocols. (More on that later.)Here’s what I found: None of the AI platforms use Plaud-sourced data to train their models, but all “monitor” the content for signs of abuse, such as hate speech and sexually suggestive content, and retain your data for one to two months for review. Plaud itself retains your source files until you permanently delete them from the trash bin or cloud backup. You can avoid the cloud entirely, if you prefer, as the device comes with 64 GB of storage. But even in that case, the company may retain your data if “local applicable laws require our continued processing of such data.”The free starter plan is enough for the occasional user, but heavier users will need to upgrade. Plaud offers 300 monthly minutes (five hours) of recording and transcription time for free, with the same features as in the paid plans minus some undefined “advanced AI features.” But if you plan to record several meetings or brainstorming sessions a week, you may need to upgrade to a paid tier like Pro (1,200 minutes per month for $100 per year) or Unlimited ($240 per year).Fellow, Wirecutter’s favorite AI-powered transcription tool for meetings, offers plans ranging from 10 recordings a month for $84 a year to unlimited recordings for $180 a year. Otter, another transcription service we’ve tested, offers tiers similar to those of Plaud at comparable rates. But Otter limits meeting recordings to just 90 minutes on its Pro plan and four hours per meeting on its Business tier.Conversely, Plaud allows you to record until the NotePen S’s battery dies, but it segments the recordings into five-hour chunks that you can later merge into a single file or summary.
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