Plaud’s NotePin is another AI wearable gadget that will assist you remember everything

After creating an impressive (not to mention somewhat TikTok Famous) Dictaphone with artificial intelligence support, Praise is launching a more ambitious gadget: a wearable that’s meant to be with you at all times, jotting down your notes and appointments, and helping you get things done. The device is called the NotePin, and the pill-shaped gadget and its line of accessories seem to take inspiration from early Fitbits. You can wear the NotePin around your neck as a pendant, clip it to your chest, strap it to your wrist, or clip it just about anywhere.

AI wearables are everywhere now, and they largely fall into one of two categories. There are social devices, like Friend, that are simply meant to provide something to hang out with and talk to. And then there are productivity devices, like Limitless, that are designed to be more useful than fun.

NotePin is firmly in the latter camp: Plaud is positioning it as a way to transcribe, summarize, and draw conclusions from everything that happens in your life. Its battery lasts for 20 hours of continuous recording, the company says, but Plaud doesn’t intend for it to be always-on—you have to tap the device to start recording, first, rather than just set it and forget about it. That’s good user interface, and good privacy practice for both users and the world at gigantic; these devices raise complicated questions about who is consenting to being recorded, and requiring manual action at least solves part of the problem.

Plaud’s first product, the Note voice recorder, is one of the better AI voice memo tools on the market. The Note is designed to clip onto the back of your phone and record voice notes or phone conversations, then automatically transcribe and summarize them. The Plaud app is a bit disjointed, but the underlying technology works pretty well. The main improvement on the NotePin is its form factor: Plaud hopes that by taking the device out of your pocket and putting it on your body, you’ll have more reasons to utilize it.

NotePin itself costs $169, and Plaud’s AI features are free for very basic utilize and $79 per year for more advanced features like summary templates and speaker labeling. (Presumably anyone interested in buying this thing will want the pro features.) The software will ultimately be what matters: The AI ​​boom seems likely to mean that a lot more people will start logging a lot more of their lives, and Plaud and its competitors will have to figure out what to do with all that information. Perfect memory is a tempting thing, but it’s notoriously tough to achieve.