Plaud.ai

Plaud.ai started with a simple bet: give people a dedicated piece of hardware instead of yet another meeting bot. The Plaud Note is a slim, card-sized recorder that captures audio anywhere a conversation happens, from conference rooms to coffee shops to phone calls. That hardware-first idea still anchors the brand, but the product around it has changed a lot. By mid-2026 Plaud sells four devices, runs a full subscription ladder, ships a desktop app that records virtual calls, and offers an enterprise tier for regulated teams.

The hardware lineup now spans the Plaud Note and NotePin at $159, the NotePin S at $179, and the flagship Note Pro at $189. The Note is about the size of a credit card and attaches magnetically to the back of a phone. For phone calls it captures both sides of the conversation through vibration sensing when attached to the handset. In an in-person meeting it sits on the table and records through built-in mics. There’s no bot to manage and no meeting platform to depend on. You press a button and it records.

What changed most is the software. After recording, audio syncs to the Plaud app on iOS, Android, web, and now native desktop apps for macOS and Windows. The app transcribes the audio and runs AI on top of it, generating summaries, mind maps, and action items across more than 110 languages, with a library of over 10,000 templates to shape the output. Plaud also added Ask Plaud, a natural-language query layer that lets you search and ask questions across your recording history. The company is bootstrapped and grew fast, reporting roughly $250M in annualized revenue by late 2025, with more than a million devices sold.

Key Features

The Plaud devices record long stretches of audio in a pocketable form factor and work in any setting without software or a meeting platform. The big 2026 addition is the Plaud Desktop app for Mac and Windows, which captures virtual meetings on Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Webex, and Slack directly from system audio, with no bot joining the call. It offers automatic, prompted, and manual recording modes, plus multimodal capture that combines audio with screen captures and highlighted moments. The desktop app is free for every subscriber, including the free Starter plan.

Beyond capture, the app generates summaries, action items, and mind maps from templates, and Ask Plaud (in beta) lets you query your transcripts in plain language. For developers and power users, Plaud now ships an MCP server, a CLI, and a developer API that let external assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and Gemini list, search, and read your Plaud recordings and summaries. Native Zapier and Google Calendar integrations round out the ecosystem.

Pricing

Hardware is a one-time purchase, from $159 for the Plaud Note or NotePin up to $189 for the Note Pro. Software is billed separately and follows a clear ladder. The free Starter plan includes 300 transcription minutes a month and does not expire. Pro is $99.99 a year (about $8.33 a month on annual billing, or $17.99 month-to-month) and lifts the cap to 1,200 minutes a month. Unlimited is $239.99 a year (about $19.99 a month annual, $29.99 monthly) with up to 24 hours a day of transcription. The Plaud Desktop app is included free at every tier.

For organizations, the Team plan starts at $20 per user per month on annual billing as a launch offer running through August 31, 2026, then moves to $25 per user per month annual or $35 monthly. Because the hardware cost is upfront and the recording itself carries no recurring fee, Plaud appeals to people who dislike subscription fatigue, though the honest comparison is total cost of ownership: device plus whatever software tier you need, weighed against a pure software alternative.

Privacy & Security

Plaud’s privacy model still has two phases. During recording, audio is captured and stored locally on the device, with no cloud connection required, which is a strong posture for the capture step. Once audio syncs to the app for transcription and AI processing, it goes to cloud servers, so the analysis stage carries the same cloud exposure as any other cloud transcription tool. The local capture remains a real advantage where network monitoring is a concern, but the end-to-end story is mixed.

For regulated teams, the picture improved with PLAUD for Business, which Plaud built after acquiring the YC-backed medical-AI startup StarJar in April 2025. It adds HIPAA and SOC 2 compliance, centralized billing, user and device management, and priority support. That makes Plaud a more credible option for healthcare, legal, and other compliance-sensitive workflows than it was a year ago.

Best For

Plaud suits professionals who need dependable audio capture across both physical and virtual settings. Lawyers recording client meetings, consultants on site, journalists running interviews, and executives in boardrooms get hardware reliability and unique phone-call recording. With the desktop app, remote and hybrid workers who live in Zoom and Teams now get bot-free capture too, which puts Plaud in direct competition with software note-takers like Granola and Fathom. Regulated teams that need HIPAA or SOC 2 coverage can look at PLAUD for Business. Where Plaud is still weaker is real-time guidance during a meeting and fully on-device processing.

How Plaud.ai Compares to Hedy

Plaud and Hedy represent two philosophies: hardware-anchored capture versus end-to-end intelligent software. Plaud’s devices guarantee recording reliability in any physical environment, and with the new desktop app it captures virtual calls without a bot, the same bot-free approach Hedy takes. So the gap on capture has narrowed. Hedy also records in-person meetings through device microphones, so neither side forces you to carry extra hardware.

The durable difference is where the AI runs. Hedy transcribes, summarizes, and coaches you entirely on-device in real time, so your conversation never has to leave your machine. Plaud captures locally but sends audio to the cloud for transcription and AI, and its in-meeting intelligence is still limited to recording rather than live guidance. Plaud has clearly closed ground on features, with Ask Plaud, an MCP server and API, calendar and Zapier integrations, and a business tier. If you want a dedicated recorder for settings where a laptop or phone is impractical, or hardware you can hand to a team, Plaud earns its place. If your priority is real-time coaching and keeping the whole pipeline private and on-device, Hedy is the stronger fit.