☀️ AI Morning Minute: AI Notetakers
My vet now asks if I want one running during the appointment. That’s how normal these have gotten.
You've probably sat in a meeting where something like "Otter is recording" slid into the participant list. That's an AI notetaker. But a lot of people don't realize they don't all live on your laptop. A bunch of them are little physical gadgets you set on the table. Same job, pretty different tradeoffs.
What it means
An AI notetaker records a conversation, transcribes it, and hands you back a summary with the decisions and action items pulled out. It comes in two flavors.
Software is the one you know: apps like Otter, Fathom, Fireflies, and Granola, plus the built-in summaries already hiding in Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet. Hardware is the other flavor: pocket recorders and little pins from folks like Plaud and Ruune, usually somewhere between $50 and $190, that listen with their own mics and sync to an app after.
Why it matters
Software is the cheap, easy on-ramp. A lot of it is already baked into tools you pay for, most have a free tier, and there’s nothing extra to lug around. Granola even skips the visible bot and just listens to your computer’s audio.
Hardware handles the real world better. Better mics mean an actual usable transcript in a loud room instead of mush. It records offline. And it won’t quietly quit on you the way a phone app can, where the app got suspended in your pocket and you find out ninety minutes later it caught nothing. That one still stings.
A physical device makes the consent part easier, which matters more than you’d think. You can point at the recorder and let people watch you switch it off. Good luck doing that with software running invisibly on a laptop nobody can see. And where I live, Washington is an all-party consent state, so everybody has to say yes before you hit record. The tool won’t ask for you.
Hey real quick: If you want to try the hardware side of this, the good folks at Ruune gave me a code that takes $30 off at purchase. It’s a $129 offline recorder, good mics, made by a local Seattle company, and honestly it’s probably the best deal on the market right now for something like this.
Simple example
Say you want to catch a good idea on a walk. The software version is the voice memo app already on your phone. Free, always there, and every so often decides it wasn’t really recording. The hardware version is a dedicated $129 recorder in your pocket with a real mic that just works, that you had to pay for, and that you have to remember to bring.
Neither one’s wrong, honestly. One’s the tool you already own. The other’s the one that doesn’t let you down when it actually counts.