The Plaud NotePin AI Memory Capsule
A “lifelogger” to keep track of what you (or your spouse) might forget
You can lie to your dog and get away with it. But everyone else, from partners to children to colleagues to cops, will quickly call you out if they perceive any discrepancy between what you said and what you later did. There have been not a few occasions in your columnist’s domestic life, and doubtless in yours too, when disputes over who said what have led to A Big Scene.
At those times, over the many decades, I have whimsically wished that there was such a gadget as a life recorder. There have actually been three commercially available “lifeloggers,” as they were known, all notably unsuccessful because they attempted to record video, which caused major privacy concerns, and they made the wearer look somewhat creepy. The most recent life recorder, the $699 Humane AI pin, failed spectacularly earlier this year, with just 10,000 pre-orders. It had only a couple of hours’ battery life and a tendency to get hot.
Now, however, there is a viable life-recording, argument-settling, attribution-clarifying product—a wearable, always-on voice recorder called the Plaud NotePin, which not only records everything going on around you but also transcribes it in any one of 59 languages.
The Plaud NotePin “memory capsule” comes from the same makers as the exceptional Plaud Note, a credit-card-sized voice recorder I judged to be the most useful innovation of 2024 back in April—for my money, it still is. These are the products of a Shenzhen start-up whose registered office is, a little bizarrely, in Sheridan, Wyoming, a Wild West town where, even more bizarrely, the late Queen Elizabeth II once spent four days on vacation.
The NotePin, which is available for pre-order with deliveries promised imminently, resembles a miniature lipstick in size, weighs under an ounce, and can be worn as a pendant, a wristband, or a pin.
It can record up to 20 hours of your life on one charge. You can, of course, turn it on and off during the day, although clicking it on at home could be construed by some as a little on the passive-aggressive side. So you’ll need to sort out how you use it, although any heated debates over its deployment will at least be delivered to you transcribed, with accompanying bullet-point summaries and mind maps.
As for the legality of recording all your conversations, it varies internationally and, in the U.S., state by state. In New York, for example, you can record conversations if you are physically in the state and a participant in the conversation, or if you have permission from one of the parties. In California and some other states, not so much, unless you have express permission. Although if you get that permission recorded on your NotePin and one party later denies having given it, whether you can use the recording as proof is the kind of moot point that makes lawyers rich.
The NotePin is a riskier launch than its superb predecessor. It will strike many as a little dorky and may well fail commercially like previous life recorders. But full marks to Plaud for bravery and an innovative spirit.
The Ruark R610 Music Console
A retro-looking hi-fi setup from England’s own Coney Island
We were enthusing here a year ago about the 1970s-style, wood-based audio products coming out of Ruark Audio, a small hi-fi company in Southend-on-Sea, London’s Coney Island.
Ruark is a real family company, to the extent that if you call for technical help, you’re quite likely to get Alan O’Rourke, the founder and owner, on the line. O’Rourke’s dad, Brian, was a cabinetmaker, music fan, and hi-fi pioneer. Ruark Audio still prioritizes carpentry, not just as a desirable artisan feature, but as an integral acoustic element.
Ruark is now building its popularity in North America, and if you’re searching for a beautiful bookshelf system that looks unlike anything else on the market and sounds terrific, we can’t recommend their new R610 Music Console highly enough—paired, ideally, with the foot-tall Sabre-R speakers. There’s also a matching CD player hitting the market shortly.
As for the electronics and the sound, they are as stellar as the last affordable bookshelf system your columnist loved this much—the wireless PSB Alpha iQ from Ontario, which we reviewed two years ago and which has been in service chez Landing Gear ever since.
Ruark’s new offering connects to its speakers by wire, so is a slightly different animal, but we were not surprised to discover that it’s built to similarly exacting standards in the factory in which PSB makes its lovely products.
Google NoteBookLM
Transform even the most complex texts into a podcast summary
One of the benefits, drawbacks, ironies—I don’t know what to call it—of being a technology writer is that you are condemned at least a couple of times a year to pronounce some new creation the most marvelous you’ve ever discovered. Which is fine, until you then have to declare a few months later, with equal certainty, that a different product is actually the most marvelous thing you’ve ever found.
But Google’s new online product, NotebookLM, is, at least for the moment, truly the most astounding application of technology this writer has yet seen.
In keeping with Google’s low-hype house style, NotebookLM is unflashily presented, with no cute logo or fancy branding, but don’t be lulled into thinking this is just another inexplicably free-to-user Google spin-off.
What is it? It’s an A.I. tool that in a couple of minutes will turn any piece of text—could be a book manuscript; a transcript of a long, boring meeting; or even a long chain of WhatsApp messages—into a spoken summary of manageable length.
But it’s not just a summary in a robotic voice with that certain A.I. quality we’ve all gotten used to detecting. It’s presented in the style of a podcast, with two nonexistent but friendly, authoritative, and even quite amusing presenters, one male and one female.
These fake podcast hosts are extraordinarily, staggeringly, uncannily realistic. There are no “tells” at all that it’s A.I. in action. The presenters are knowledgeable, critical in a sophisticated way, and introduce relevant information that’s not in the text they are discussing.
We gave NotebookLM four test texts, and the results were truly incredible. The first was all 18,000 words of the September 6 Harris-versus-Trump debate. It reduced this to an eight-minute discussion with judicious observations, comparisons, and jokes (all, it must be noted, to Trump’s detriment). It then turned a 9,000-word speech by Adolf Hitler in 1941 into a 13-minute summary discussion, the tone of which is appropriately ominous—no jokes.
We then fed it Books One and Two of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 14,000 words in total of dense, archaic, and notoriously difficult 17-century English. It delivered two bite-sized, 10-minute discussions, and even managed to leaven the heavyweight material a little: “So who are they trying to impress here? It’s not like they’re hosting dinner parties in the underworld. And Mammon seems a little too preoccupied with earthly treasures for someone who’s literally surrounded by fire and brimstone.”
O.K., neither of these A.I.-generated discussions would impress a professor at an Ivy League school. They’re glib in parts. When you get used to the style, it’s possible to see the stitching a little. But you’d need a hard heart to feel it’s far short of miraculous. What could be next?
The OneAdaptr OneGo 5-in-1 Wireless Charging Stand PowerBank
A single adapter to satisfy all of your Apple-device charging needs
Hong Kong’s OneAdaptr continues honing and finessing its travel adapters and gadgets to the point where you think, surely, they’ll run out of possible improvements.
Last February, we featured their OneGo miniature charging station for an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods, all of which can cling magnetically to the fold-flat plug-in stand.
With the OneGo you might typically top up all your devices overnight on your hotel bedstand, then slide out the battery part to act as a portable charger for during the day.
Now, OneAdaptr has a new model, the OneGo 5-in-1, which is just a single piece—a charger for all three devices that can be plugged in or operate on battery power. Why it’s called a 5-in-1 is slightly puzzling, but it’s brilliantly designed, like everything the company produces. The gadget may not sound exciting, but it genuinely improves your tech life, wherever you are.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology
