Let’s Applaud Plaud

For the last five or six years I’ve been bemoaning the fact that most of the audio industry has been ignoring one of the great earbud innovations – the battery box.  When Bragi came up with the concept in 2014 it was a very necessary invention.  Earbud batteries didn’t last more than an hour at most, so you needed a neat way to store and recharge them.  Apple refined it into the form we know today with their first Airpods, after which it’s been more or less left as it is.

It’s always felt like an opportunity missed.  There’s so much more you can do with it.  With the greater versatility of earbuds using the new Bluetooth LE Audio specifications it can do volume and media control (and a few companies have got around to do that).  With Auracast, it can be used to find and display the available broadcast audio streams around you.  You can put in camera in it to scan QR codes to select music streams.  (Apple filed a rather basic patent on that back in 2019, and there are rumours it might soon see the light of day).  Or you can take advantage of the decent sized battery to add a cellular modem and SIM to provide a local access point for audio and data.  So, I was really pleased to see Plaud do exactly that with their new Plaud One.  They’ve put an AI agent into the battery box to let you make sense of conversations and summarise your day.

The Plaud One is by no means the first personal AI hardware offering.  We’ve had Humane’s Pin, the Rabbit R1 and a host of others, all of which have quickly disappeared,  They looked slick in their promotional videos, but failed to work as well as promised in real life.  We don’t know whether the Plaud One will suffer the same fate, but what is interesting is that it comes from a rather different background.  Plaud have been developing AI for note-taking, concentrating on capturing voice and turning that into notes and actions.  They’re not alone, but they’ve developed a nice balance between phone app and hardware.  They claim over 2.5 million professional users and have used those to develop vertical applications which appear to work,

What I like about the approach is the way that it moves phone and laptop out of the workflow for most of the time.  The phone app is still there when you need it, but it seems that you’re likely to use the phone a lot less.  Like many other attempts to wean us away from our phone fixation, the Plaud One uses audio to whisper in our ear, answering questions, finding information and performing actions.  What feels different (and I’m yet to play with a Plaud) is that it appears to do a good job of integrating with phone or PC when it needs to.  Unlike other AI pins, or smart glasses, it doesn’t try to do everything itself. It feels like one of the most interesting steps we’ve seen recently, on the principle of don’t do too much, but do it well.  Although many believe that the smartphone form factor will live forever, I doubt it.  I suspect that we’re not far from discovering what will come next.  We will almost certainly see a number of small steps before that answer emerges, and the Plaud One looks as if it could be the first of those to gain traction.  I’m looking forward to seeing how it works.