“Most companies are innovating with AI with already digitized data on the internet,” Plaud CEO Nathan Hsu says in a press briefing ahead of the NotePin’s release. “But there is so much data in our real-life scenarios. What we say, what we hear, and what we see.”
Are You Getting This Down?
Transcribing your life is a noble endeavor. A decent amount of the long, tedious task of transcribing an interview or meeting notes by hand can be handed off to a good speech recognition service. But—take it from a journalist who routinely uses automated transcription services to type out interviews—those services sure aren’t perfect, and they can often generate entirely wrong sentences, completely misspell names, or mangle basic facts.
Avijit Ghosh, a policy researcher at the AI company Hugging Face, points out that AI speech recognition also historically has trouble recognizing people speaking with particular accents, which can lead to misunderstandings. (Hsu says this hasn’t been an issue that Plaud users have brought up.) Add in the extra idiosyncrasies that generative AI systems can hallucinate into existence and you’re often left with an almost-but-not-quite-there picture of what happened. It may be better than the types of transcriptions you had access to before, but it’s important to recognize what limitations the tools may have. Relying on that incomplete information to guide your work life could result in some uncomfortable misconceptions, or just lead to embarrassment.
“It might completely make up things that have never been said,” Ghosh says.
There are also security concerns that come from both relying on AI for business meetings and having so much information stored in a wearable device. Plaud says its cloud transcription and summarization service is encrypted by default, but the device itself is not. If a user loses a device and someone else snatches it up, any recordings stored on the device could be accessed if they connect it to their computer. Hsu says this is not likely to be a problem, because the NotePin uses a proprietary charging connector, so bad actors wouldn’t be able to access the device unless they have a NotePin of their own. (To which I would say, have you seen the lengths that hackers are willing to go to in order to steal secrets?) Also, the NotePin has a built-in “find my” feature that helps keep it from getting lost. Still, it’s not a perfectly closed system.
“In that case, if you’re not taking precautions and you lose the device, that could be accessible,” Hsu says. “But that’s very extreme.”
Ultimately, Hsu has greater ambitions for his company than work-focused devices, though he’s careful to point out that this is what they’re concentrating on now, and he’s cognizant of the uneasiness it might cause.
“We have this grand vision, where what happens if users could just record all of the conversations in their daily lives, maybe even after decades,” Hsu says. “If it always listens to you, it learns you, and over time it gets to know your personality, your preferences, your interactions. Someday, you’re going to be able to utilize AI to reproduce yourself—create this real digital twin. That’s kind of this grand mission, where we think if we’re able to help users connect to so many memories, it’s going to be grand.”
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