Digital meeting assistants like Read AI and Fireflies have been great for Zoom calls, but they’re useless the moment you step into a conference room. That’s where physical AI notetakers come in, and there are suddenly a lot of them.
These gadgets promise to record your in-person meetings, transcribe everything, and spit out summaries with action items. Some clip to your shirt. Others fit in your wallet. A few look like jewelry you’d actually wear.
The question isn’t whether these devices work (most of them do), it’s whether you actually need one.
The Credit Card Contenders
Plaud Note has been around since 2023, which makes it practically ancient in AI hardware years. The newer Pro version costs $179 and packs four mics into a credit card shape. It records audio from about three to five meters away, which is decent for small meeting rooms but probably not great for large conferences.
You get 300 free transcription minutes per month. After that, you’re paying.
Mobvi’s TicNote costs $159 and throws in 600 free minutes, which is double what Plaud offers. The company claims support for 120+ languages with real-time translation. That’s impressive on paper, though how well it actually handles code-switching or thick accents remains to be seen. The standout feature here is the ability to create podcast-style summaries of your conversations, which honestly sounds either really useful or deeply weird depending on your meeting culture.
Then there’s Comulytic Note Pro, also $159, but here’s the twist: unlimited transcription with no subscription. Just buy the device and transcribe as much as you want. The catch? If you want AI summaries, action items, or any of the actually useful AI features, you’re paying $15 monthly or $119 yearly. So it’s not really unlimited in the way that matters.
Wearables That Don’t Scream “I’m Recording You”
Plaud’s NotePin takes the same tech from their card-shaped devices and shrinks it into something you can wear. You can clip it to your shirt, wear it as a pendant, or strap it to your wrist. The S version adds a physical button, which seems obvious but apparently needed to be a premium feature.
Both cost about the same as the card versions ($159 and $179), but you’re trading recording range for portability. Two mics instead of four, and about 20 hours of battery life.
The Omi pendant is the budget option at $89, and you can immediately tell why. It has no onboard storage and needs to stay connected to your phone. It’s basically a Bluetooth mic with some AI processing happening on your device. The upside? It’s open-source, so developers have built custom apps and integrations around it. That matters if you’re the tinkering type, but most people just want something that works out of the box.
The Weird Ones
Viaim made AI notetaking earbuds, because apparently we needed another thing to put in our ears. They’re $200 and transcribe calls in 78 languages. The earbuds case doubles as a recorder for when you’re not wearing them, which is actually clever. Whether you want to walk around with earbuds in all day just to record meetings is another question entirely.
Anker’s Soundcore Work pin comes with a puck-shaped battery pack that extends recording time to 32 hours. It costs $159 and gives you the same 300 free minutes as Plaud. Anker’s selling point is the five-meter range, which is one meter better than Plaud’s claim. Whether that meter matters in real-world use is debatable.
The Subscription Problem
Almost all of these devices hook you with hardware prices, then get you on subscriptions. The transcription minutes are never quite enough if you’re in meetings all day. And the basic transcription without AI summaries is like buying a smartphone that can only make calls, technically functional but missing the entire point.
The Technology here isn’t revolutionary. Good mics, decent battery life, and cloud AI processing. What’s interesting is watching companies figure out the form factor. Do people want a card in their pocket? A pin on their shirt? Something around their neck?
The real test is whether your coworkers will find these things creepy. Recording conversations without obvious visual cues makes people uncomfortable, regardless of whether you announced it at the start of the meeting. A phone on the table is one thing. A pendant recording everything you say is something else entirely.
These devices exist in a weird space between useful business tools and privacy nightmares. They’ll probably get smaller, cheaper, and better at what they do. Whether that’s a good thing depends entirely on who’s wearing them and why.
