This pocket AI voice recorder took me back to the good old days of dictation (and shorthand)

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I’m old enough to have been taught a bunch of skills that are now essentially dead. Shorthand is one of those skills that I learned and used, and has since been pushed out of my brain by “Simpsons” quotes. I look at the lines and squiggles now, and it makes absolutely no sense.

Another skill that’s come and gone is dictation and transcription. I had a number of recorders over the years — from tape to electronic — and used them extensively. I’ve lost count of how many recorders have burst apart when they were dropped.

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Dictation and transcription gave way to speech-to-text software. I remember trying this in the late 1990s and feeling it had potential, but it was also frustrating. As someone taught to type, the keyboard was always quicker and cleaner… until recently. 

Thanks to a hearty chomp from a disease-ridden Scottish tick, I’ve been left with a small amount of cramping and neuropathy in my hands. The symptoms are more annoying than debilitating, but they did leave me wondering if non-keyboard options had improved.

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This is the path that got me to try the Comulytic Note Pro AI Voice Recorder, a credit card-sized recorder that uses AI to organize your thoughts, meetings, and memos. 

There are two parts to this system — the physical recorder and the app that leverages AI to get things done. 

The recorder

Let’s start with the recorder. 

Shaped like a small stack of credit cards, the Note Pro AI voice recorder measures approximately 3.37 x 2.04 x 0.12 inches and weighs just one ounce. It reminds me of the Bluetooth finder cards you buy for your wallet or purse, but as I’ll get to shortly, it’s missing one feature they have in common.

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It has a tiny 128 × 80-pixel display along one side, and a single button. A press starts off a recording, another press stops it.

The unit is packed with a triple-mic array featuring AI noise reduction, an effective range of up to 15 feet, and 64GB of internal storage for recordings.

Inside is a battery that offers 45 hours of continuous recording and a whopping 107 days of standby. It comes with a magnetic slip case that attaches to a smartphone and a proprietary charging cable that connects to the pins on the back of the card. 

The app

Then there’s the app (iOS/Android), which is where the voice recordings go for AI processing. You can find an app for both iOS and Android, and connecting the recorder to the app is very easy to do.

Every recorder comes with a free Starter Plan that offers unlimited free transcription and basic AI summaries; however, advanced features such as Advanced Summary, Instant Abstract, and Ask Comulytic Assistant require a paid subscription starting at $10 a month.

The recordings are offloaded from the recorder to the app, where all the AI magic happens, and it becomes the hub for everything you do with the recorder.

And none of this AI is bespoke to Comulytic; the app leverages third-party services.

Comulytic claims that the recordings are encrypted using AES and that everything is done to meet SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, GDPR, CCPA, and CPRA requirements, and we will have to take their word for it. 

My verdict after two months of use

I want to preface what follows with some caveats. First, note-taking, whether shorthand or voice notes or some AI-powered speech-to-text system, is very personal, and how I do it will almost certainly differ from how you do it. Keep that in mind.

Much like a notebook and pen, this sort of device is a blank slate, ready for the user to leave their mark. And just as a notebook’s effectiveness depends on the quality of your handwriting, and how well you are at putting down your thoughts, this device here relies quite a lot on the clarity of your voice and thoughts. Someone who speaks clearly and concisely is going to have a very different experience from someone who mumbles and waffles.

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I recorded hours of conversations — with permission where third parties were involved — under a variety of situations. Sometimes the recorder was on a table in front of me, other times it was in the cargo pocket of my trousers. Irrespective of the recorder’s location, I was getting excellent speech-to-text accuracy, well in excess of the 98% that Comulytic claims. And I was getting this accuracy out of the box, without giving it my voice profile.

In fact, I felt accuracy worsened after I added my profile. Counterintuitive, I know, but this was my experience, and I ended up deleting the training I’d done. Overall, it’s spookily good, and up there with the dictation features that Apple has built into the iPhone and Mac.

I wish I could say the same about the ability to differentiate between speakers. This was hit-and-miss at best. It could be working fine one minute, only for it to suddenly stop working before kicking back into life again.

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All this in a single recording.

The app also tries very, very hard to get you to subscribe to the premium services. Features like the AI-powered instant abstract were useful, but not useful enough that I’d be willing to pay for them. Maybe this is because I’m used to using dictation, I’m good at getting my words down in a summarized way, and I don’t attend a lot of meetings and such that need condensing.

Battery life does not disappoint, and it feels like this recorder can go on forever. What I’m less happy about is the proprietary magnetic charging cable that I need to avoid losing. Spares do exist online, and I also discovered that the cable for my Seeed Studio SenseCAP LoRa mesh tracker card worked for charging. Bonus! 

However, I hate proprietary charging cables, and I wish that these makers would take a leaf out of the Bluetooth finder card market and build in support for wireless charging. The solution exists, and I hope next-gen AI voice-note recorders adopt it. 

Two lingering concerns

The more I used the Note Pro AI voice recorder, the more I liked it, but I couldn’t shake a couple of concerns. First, there’s just too much AI for my liking. Even with basic transcription, the robotic overlords take liberties, and the output is nowhere near as faithful to the original recording as a human transcriber would be.

Also, given the direction that AI is going with watermarking (a feature that will aid AI companies more than anyone, because it will allow AI slop to be identified and prevented from being added to training data), it’s not long before anything and everything that comes from a device like this will have AI’s digital fingerprints all over it, and this could result in anything that’s outputted from this tool to get a “touched by AI” aura label stamped onto it.

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The other issue is related to privacy, including laws surrounding consent to being recorded. This is a deep rabbit hole, should you choose to make the leap, with different rules in different territories. Be aware that these sorts of rules exist.

Alongside this is the backlash against recording tools that devices like Meta Glasses have sparked (it reminds me of the outcry around the original Google Glass, but Meta’s hardware is far more mainstream and ubiquitous). I’ve witnessed hate directed at Meta Glasses, and it’s not pretty. A voice recorder is not in the same category, but sensitivity may still be needed.

A way I found to seem more obvious and weird when using this recorder in public was to wear my AirPods. They don’t connect to the recorder or do anything, but they did make it look like I was on a call, rather than creepily talking to myself.

ZDNET’s buying advice

The Comulytic Note Pro AI voice recorder currently costs $116, with 10% off the usual price. For that money, you get decent hardware that connects to a pretty decent, although sometimes annoying and rather cluttered, app that tries its utmost to upsell every time I touch it.

If all you want is to have AI transcribe your voice, this tool will do the trick at no extra cost. And it will do it rather robustly if it’s just one of you speaking, but might (unless you have more success than I did) mash together two or more speakers.

But if you want to use one of the many advanced features sprinkled throughout the app, it’s going to put its hand in your pocket for a subscription. And this is where you’re going to have to stop and think, because there’s quite a spread between the monthly one-off prices and annual billing (the first “Premium” tier is $14.99 per month, or $120 if you buy an annual subscription).

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If you need to remember stuff, either things that come tumbling from your head or others, and you’re a bit of a geardo and like having something new to play with, you’ll likely find cool ways to use a tool like this. But if you’re a bit of a curmudgeon, dislike AI, or don’t want to have yet another thing in your life to keep charged (with a proprietary cable, no less), this might be something to pass on.