Amazon Prime Day is in full swing, with thousands of deeply discounted tech gadgets on sale to tempt you to spend money before payday. But to me, one of the best products on offer is a seemingly unassuming product that’s truly life-changing for anyone who needs to take notes on a regular basis. And every student should have one.
The Plaud Note is a credit card sized voice recorder that’s incredibly powerful. It may be one of the best time saving devices I’ve ever used. Like any Dictaphone, it can record meetings, seminars and events, whether in person, by video or over the phone. It uses a clever magnetic clip to attach to your device and allows you to record both sides of the call while you’re on the phone.
But where Note really shines is after you press “stop.” As someone who regularly gets interviewed for work and attends big meetings and presentations, my phone ends up filled with recordings that I can spend hours sifting through and then stopping to transcribe the important bits.
Read more: Amazon Prime Day Nespresso sale saves £214 on ‘perfect’ machine, ‘better than the big chains’
Read more: Nestle’s Big Chocolate Box, containing over 1kg of chocolate, is under £20 on Amazon Prime Day
Even after spending a lot of money on Otter.ai, a system that runs audio files and automatically transcribes them, it only speeds things up a little and forces you to relisten to the recording to figure out what doesn’t make sense. Note not only takes a snippet of audio and transcribes it later, it also summarizes the recording with bullet points to tell you everything that was covered.
When I first looked at it, I was amazed at how well it grouped together related information, even if it was mentioned at different times but touched on the same subject, and it really took my note-taking to the next level.
After attending the two-hour training session, Proud Note transcribed everything that was said into a summary for me to review, and created a handy mind map of key points (Image: Narin Flanders)
Sure, with a lot of time and effort and my trusty notepad and four-color pens, I could have converted my handwritten notes that way, but the third thing that The Note does is beyond all of my capabilities.
The app takes your notes and creates a printable mind map that captures everything that’s been said and topics that have been touched upon – an appealing approach for visual learners, and something that someone like me with frankly lackluster PowerPoint skills could only dream of creating.
When I got it, The Note was priced at £149. The Amazon Prime Day sale reduced the price to a more affordable £119, but even at the original price I was so happy with it that I think it was worth the money. It’s a total game-changer for both work and personal use.
Whether you’re a student who’s exhausted trying to organize your notes after a lecture or someone who gets distracted during a meeting, this is a game-changing tool – it eliminates the hassle of having to sort and organize your notes after a session is over.
I’ve used it for interviews, training sessions and lectures and have been very impressed with the quality of the summaries generated. It’s especially useful if you’re listening to information on a complex or very boring topic. Firstly, you have the audio to refer to and it helps to summarise it into more understandable chunks.
This small yet powerful device comes with 64GB of storage, enough for 480 hours of audio, and you can also store up to 10,000 minutes in the Plaud cloud if you want, plus share all your saved content with others to work with on group projects.
Of course, there are plenty of other Dictaphone-style gadgets (and apps) on the market, many of which have popped up in the Prime Day sales and elsewhere – The Note has a solid 4.4 out of 5 star rating on Amazon – the 64Gb Nekside Dictaphone has been reduced to just £19.99, and Argos is selling a £39.99 version that you can click and collect instantly.
But for me, the AI-powered transcription and summarization elements take The Note to the next level and are worth the extra cost. While the reviews on Amazon have been generally positive, it wasn’t until I took the plunge and tried it myself that I realised just how useful it was, so the images used in this review were taken at a recent training session.
Remember, when you buy The Note, you get 300 minutes of transcription and summarization included each month. If you need more, you can buy extra minutes or pay £80 for a yearly subscription. This makes the overall cost a little higher, but worth it for heavy users. And considering my Otter.ai subscription was similarly priced, it seems like a reasonable switch for heavy users. That said, 300 minutes a month has been enough for my needs so far.
