There is a collar for that if you want to stay in shape while attending meetings, keep track of people you meet, or simply remember the name of the mysterious dog food your veterinarian recommended you give your doggie. Or a headband. Or a button.
Plaud is an AI company that makes the subtly named Plaud Note—a thin ChatGPT-enabled sound recorder that can be stuck on the backside of your cellphone or slipped into a shirt pocket to report, transcribe, and explain your conversations.
The Plaud NotePin is the company’s newest product ( the name does n’t get any better here ), and it packs basically all the same features into a wearable device about the size of a lipstick tube. The NotePin can be worn as a collar, a watches, or a button, or clipped onto everything like a sleeve.
It costs$ 169 and lets you record up to 300 hours of music per month. For the master plan, which includes 1, 200 hours per month and extra features like labels that can show which speakers are unique in a transcription, you may pay a$ 79 yearly fee to record more.
If a portable unit with these functions sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve been here before. Even if it’s not entirely clear whether they’re of sufficient use to persuade people to wear them, there are numerous Artificial gadgets. Consumers were unresponsive in response to the first wave of significant AI devices, including the Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI pin, largely because they either did n’t really work, could have just been an app, or simply appeared a little stupid. The news of Friend, the AI necklace that only wants to get your chum has not been made yet, but it was met with outcry for how its constantly-listening design defies cultural norms that forbid eavesdropping on meetings. The single hardware device with AI that is currently in use has been Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, despite the fact that their AI capabilities can use some improvement. Everything else has either looked very stupid, did not function as promoted, or just may be bested by the features on a cellphone. Hardware is challenging, as they say.
That has n’t stopped the work-oriented AI gadget hopefuls. Portable devices are being shipped into the earth from businesses like Plaud and Rewind in large numbers. AI, and Limitless. After all, technology advancement takes a while, but chances are these devices were in development before Humane collapsed, and now the companies have to do something with their tech. Google’s Pixel smartphone and Apple’s smartphones are being loaded up with similar production features, all in the effort to make people’s job lives more reasonable and more effective.
Plaud is eager to entice that chaos with its brand-new handgrenade. The business is directly promoting its new product to productivity junkies, including salespeople tracking leads, business bros trying to make connections at conferences, and anyone looking to get a handle on their countless daily meetings. There’s a sort of simplicity to the NotePin. The purpose of this is primarily to take notes rather than the numerous promises that some AI devices make. Turn the recorder on, let it do what it wants, and then check the bullet points for the key points later.
In a press release released prior to the NotePin’s release, Plaud CEO Nathan Hsu stated that” the majority of companies are innovating with AI with already digitized data on the internet. ” But there is so much data in our real-life scenarios. What we say, what we hear, and what we see”.
Are You Getting This Down?
Transcribing your life is a noble endeavor. A good speech recognition service can handle a good portion of the lengthy, labor-intensive task of handwriting an interview or meeting notes. But—take it from a journalist who routinely uses automated transcription services to type out interviews—those services sure are n’t perfect, and they can often generate entirely wrong sentences, completely misspell names, or mangle basic facts.
Avijit Ghosh, a policy researcher at the AI company Hugging Face, points out that AI speech recognition has historically struggled to recognize people speaking with particular accents, which can cause miscommunications. ( Hsu claims that this has n’t been a problem that Plaud users have raised. ) When generative AI systems are added to their idiosyncrasies, their existence is frequently left with an almost-but-not-quite-there picture of what transpired. It may be superior to the transcriptions you previously had access to, but it’s important to be aware of the limitations the tools might have. Relying on that incomplete information to guide your work life could result in some uncomfortable misconceptions, or just lead to embarrassment.
Ghosh claims that “it might completely make up things that have never been said.”
Due to the use of AI for business meetings and having so much data stored in a wearable device, security concerns also arise. Plaud claims that the device itself is not encrypted, but that its cloud transcription and summarization service is by default. Any recordings stored on a device may be accessed if a user connects it to their computer if they lose it and someone else steals it. Because the NotePin uses a proprietary charging connector, according to Hsu, it is unlikely to cause a problem for bad actors to use their own NotePins. Have you seen the lengths that hackers are willing to go to in order to steal secrets, to which I would say? Also, the NotePin has a built-in “find my” feature that helps keep it from getting lost. Still, it’s not a perfectly closed system.
” In that case, if you’re not taking precautions and you lose the device, that could be accessible”, Hsu says. ” But that’s very extreme”.
Ultimately, Hsu has greater ambitions for his company than work-focused devices, though he’s careful to point out that this is what they’re concentrating on now, and he’s cognizant of the uneasiness it might cause.
” We have this grand vision, where what happens if users could just record all of the conversations in their daily lives, maybe even after decades”, Hsu says. ” If it always listens to you, it learns you, and over time it gets to know your personality, your preferences, your interactions. Someday, you’re going to be able to utilize AI to reproduce yourself—create this real digital twin. That’s kind of this grand mission, where we think if we’re able to help users connect to so many memories, it’s going to be grand”.
It’s obvious that AI has the potential to alter a lot of how people operate. However, some advocates and experts question what happens when these capabilities are given to AI devices, particularly those that are meant to be worn continuously.
Jodi Halpern, a professor of bioethics and medical humanities at UC Berkeley, compared the trend of transferring human capabilities to AI devices in an interview for a previous article about AI gadgets to how people can rely on a service like Google Maps to follow directions.
” There may be dimensions of human development that just do n’t occur anymore”, Halpern says. We may not develop social emotional depth when dealing with people who are different from ourselves and being empathically curious, just like we do n’t develop senses of direction. If we have a constant feeling that something’s listening and sort of surveilling us, it’s a way to not learn how to be, in a certain way, alone with ourselves”.
Despite all that philosophical grandiosity, it’s still unclear whether people are actually willing to invest in these kinds of things. Plaud has a compelling use case, but it is entering a competitive market where it must compete with other devices and, well, thousands of apps on smartphones, which people already carry around all day.
Users may discover that these dull, obscene tools are more mature and effective than any of these innovative, fashionable gadgets.
” Everything that ChatGPT does, it does worse than something that was created to do that thing,” Ghosh claims. The main issue, in my opinion, is that people are tricked into believing these systems are more accurate than they actually are.
