Plaud

Plaud is built around a bet that most of the conversations worth capturing do not happen in a video call. Its hardware — a card-thin recorder, a Note Pro, and the wearable NotePin — records in-person meetings, phone calls and hallway conversations, then hands the audio to Plaud's own transcription and summarisation pipeline. A desktop app covers online meetings by capturing them natively, without a bot joining the call.

The pipeline

Capture takes audio from a device or an import, plus text you type in for context and images you attach.

Extract runs transcription in 112 languages with speaker labels and a custom vocabulary for names and jargon the model would otherwise mangle, then generates summaries from a library of more than 10,000 templates — one recording can produce several differently-shaped outputs, so the same client call yields both a CRM note and an action list. Plaud routes this through frontier models including GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro rather than a single in-house model.

Utilise is where it stops being a transcription tool: Ask Plaud answers questions across your recordings with references back to the source, and AutoFlow applies rules so a given recording is automatically transcribed, summarised in a chosen template and delivered where it needs to go. Everything syncs to the mobile app, web and desktop with unlimited cloud storage.

Compliance

Plaud holds ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certifications and states GDPR compliance — relevant given the product's whole premise is recording other people. Consent rules for recording conversations vary by jurisdiction and remain the user's responsibility.

Cost

The app is free to download. Starter is free with every Plaud device and includes 300 transcription minutes a month. Pro is $8.33 a month billed annually ($17.99 monthly) for 1,200 minutes. Unlimited is $19.99 a month billed annually ($29.99 monthly) for effectively uncapped transcription. Unused minutes do not roll over. The company reports over 2 million users.