Plaud’s NotePin was already a niche favorite: a pill-shaped, wearable AI recorder that quietly captured your meetings, spat out transcripts, and auto-generated neat little summaries you could drop into docs or emails without much editing. With the new NotePin S, Plaud hasn’t reinvented that idea so much as admitted a very human truth — when you’re in the middle of a tense Zoom call or a live panel discussion, nobody wants to be guessing whether a subtle squeeze gesture actually started recording. So Plaud did the simplest thing it could have done: it added a button.​

On paper, the NotePin S is basically a sequel where the plot stays the same, but the pacing improves. The capsule-style hardware looks almost identical to the original, with that Fitbit-esque pill design and the same understated color palette: black, purple, or silver. It’s tiny at about 2.01 x 0.83 x 0.43 inches, weighing just over 17 grams, so it’s the kind of gadget you forget you’re wearing until you need it. Inside, you still get 64GB of storage, enough for hundreds of hours of compressed audio, plus dual MEMS microphones tuned to pick up voices clearly within roughly 3 meters — basically a conference room radius. Battery life sits at up to 20 hours of continuous recording and roughly a month on standby, which is slightly conservative by AI-gadget standards but perfectly serviceable for day-to-day meeting duty.​

The big difference is how you interact with it. The original NotePin leaned on haptics and a long squeeze to start recording, with a subtle buzz to confirm it had actually kicked in. It was clever, minimalist, and just ambiguous enough to betray you at the worst possible time. Miss the squeeze, and your “notes” for that client call or lecture became a blank timeline. The NotePin S trades that fussy interaction for one big, obvious control: long-press the button to start recording, tap it to drop a highlight marker you can jump back to later. There’s nothing particularly futuristic about the approach, and that’s kind of the point — if your AI assistant is going to live or die on whether people actually use it in the moment, a low-friction, idiot-proof trigger is more valuable than any clever gesture.​

What makes Plaud’s hardware appealing in the first place isn’t just the recording; it’s the whole pipeline. Once NotePin S captures audio, Plaud’s backend models transcribe the conversation, segment speakers, and spit out summaries, action points, and key highlights without you having to babysit the process. That’s the same pitch as the original: transform messy, real-world conversations into something structured enough to drop straight into project trackers, CRMs, or your own second-brain workflow. The company bundles a baseline of 300 minutes of transcription per month on its consumer plans, which is enough for light to medium meeting schedules and gives users a real sense of the workflow without forcing them into an enterprise-style commitment.​

The hardware itself has been subtly rethought around how people actually wear and use these things. With the first NotePin, you bought into a flexible system — clip, magnetic pin, lanyard, wristband — but you didn’t necessarily get all those accessories in the box. The NotePin S fixes that nickel-and-dime feeling: at $179, the new model ships with the whole attachment kit included, so you can wear it as a pendant, a watch-like wristband, a clipped badge, or a magnetically pinned mic on your shirt. In practice, that means one device can jump from a boardroom to a hallway interview to a casual walking meeting without forcing you to rethink how you mount it.​

Underneath the small design tweaks is a bigger question: is there still room in 2026 for a dedicated AI recorder when your phone, laptop, and video-conferencing platforms are all racing to bake in their own transcription features? The Verge’s earlier review of the original NotePin basically argued that the hardware is excellent but feels doomed in a world where “AI audio” is more likely to become a feature than a standalone product. And that argument hasn’t aged poorly — Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, and even note-taking apps like Notion and Otter are aggressively pushing built-in recording, transcription, and summarization. The way Plaud is trying to fight that gravity is by building not just a gadget, but an ecosystem that treats every conversation — virtual or in-person — as a first-class data source.​

That’s where Plaud Desktop comes in. Launched alongside the NotePin S, the Mac and Windows app is designed to sit quietly in the background and wake up whenever a meeting starts on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or other conferencing platforms. Instead of joining the call as a bot — the typical approach for AI note-takers that often triggers privacy concerns and awkward “There’s a recorder here” warnings — Plaud Desktop records natively on your machine, capturing both system audio and your microphone locally. You can set it to record every meeting automatically, prompt you when it detects a call, or require a manual start so you’re not accidentally logging every casual chat.​

The interesting thing about Plaud’s setup is how seamlessly the hardware and software now talk to each other. Whether the audio comes from a NotePin S clipped to your collar in a conference room or from Plaud Desktop running during a video call, the recordings funnel into the same account, the same models, and the same note library. Summaries, timestamps, and action items live alongside one another, so a day that starts with an in-person stakeholder meeting and ends with a remote standup still looks like a single, coherent timeline of conversations. For anyone juggling hybrid work, that continuity is arguably more valuable than the hardware itself.​

Plaud is also leaning pretty heavily into privacy and control as differentiators, which is smart given the arms race in AI recording. Plaud Desktop’s local capture model means you aren’t forced to invite a mysterious “AI bot” into every call just to get notes, and you can fine-tune what gets recorded at the app level. On the hardware side, NotePin S still supports Apple’s Find My network, which is less about privacy and more about not losing yet another tiny gadget to the depths of a backpack or coat pocket. For professionals who operate in regulated or sensitive environments, the ability to avoid third-party bots, keep fine-grained control, and still extract structured notes from meetings is a big part of the pitch.​

The price, however, nudges Plaud further into “serious tool” territory. At $179, NotePin S costs a little more than the original NotePin, which launched at $169 and is now being phased out. That’s not outrageous for a dedicated professional device, especially with all the accessories now bundled in, but it does sit in uncomfortable proximity to midrange phones and tablets that already offer capable on-device recording. The real bet here is that if you live in documents and conversations all day — think consultants, journalists, researchers, project managers, or founders hopping between investor calls and internal standups — the friction reduction of pressing one dedicated button and trusting a tuned pipeline will be worth more than juggling yet another app on your phone.​

From a distance, NotePin S feels less like a flashy CES gadget and more like an iterative fix aimed squarely at people who were already “almost sold” on the original. The people who loved the concept but hated the haptic ambiguity; the ones who clipped a NotePin to their shirt, walked into a tense strategy meeting, and walked out only to discover they never actually recorded a thing. For them, the physical button isn’t trivial; it’s a trust mechanism. A thing you can glance at, press, and feel confident that the system is doing the one job it exists to do.​

The bigger story is how Plaud is quietly stepping into the gap between “just record everything” and “actually understand what was said.” In a world full of generative AI demos, NotePin S and Plaud Desktop are surprisingly grounded. They don’t promise to turn your team into a fully autonomous agent factory; they promise to keep track of what people said, when they said it, and what you’re supposed to do next — whether you were in a noisy hall at CES or staring at a grid of faces on a Tuesday afternoon Zoom. And sometimes, especially in tech, that kind of quietly reliable tool is more radical than yet another big, abstract AI vision.