Graydon Carter, one of the greatest editors alive and the genius behind the best years of Vanity Fair, now runs the online lifestyle magazine Air Mail. He is renowned for his taste, so it was noteworthy when, in a New York Times feature on his Air Mail pop-up shop, he mentioned the Plaud recorder. The writer of the feature didn’t care to mention it by name, but Carter gives a compelling pitch for it:

“Mr. Carter, while seated at a table at the rear of the shop on Tuesday, pulled out an object as flat and trim as a credit card. “This is an amazing tape recorder,” he said with the candid delight of a boy discovering his first Erector Set. The device, which costs $159, is sold at Air Mail Newsstand and, Mr. Carter explained, can connect to a smartphone.”

This is the dream version of what the Plaud AI recorder is, and it’s 90 percent of the way to being an amazing product. Those final 10 percent, though, are crucial and so frustrating that it makes the recorder a difficult recommendation.

The device is almost miraculously thin, made of stylish grooved metal with just one toggle, one button, and a discreet notification light. Toggle down, and with a long press of the button, you can record thoughts or interviews using the in-built microphones, which are uploaded to the cloud for transcription.

This is how I mostly used the device, quickly capturing notes from reading or thoughts while out and about, keeping it in the pocket of my shirt. This experience is truly lovely; there’s something delightful about using something so light and thin. With a long press and vibration under the finger, you can jot down your thoughts, saved to a digital cloud. The only issue I found was the delay between the vibration of the long press and when it actually starts recording. The beginning of several notes and thoughts of mine were unfortunately cut off, as though the vibration and notification light made it seem as though it had started recording, it only started a few seconds after.

Switch that toggle up, and attach it to the back of your phone using their optional MagSafe cases, and you can record phone calls on the device. Though most call-recording apps have been banned from the Google and Apple app stores, this records from the vibration of the earpiece and, as a journalist, it’s proven very handy.

It is worth noting that the recording quality is pretty bad, but that’s a necessary compromise of the size; and it’s not a problem anyway as you usually will read these notes instead of listening to them courtesy of their transcription service.

I love Plaud’s hardware, but it’s the transcription that breaks the device for me. The actual AI transcription quality is fine, though it needs better grammar detection, but it doesn’t auto-generate from the files.

Instead, one by one, for every recording, you have to manually select the transcription language and what kind of summary you would like, and then it starts generating the transcript for you. Compare this to Google’s Recorder app for the Google Pixel. You press the button in the app, and it almost perfectly live transcribes your audio as you talk without having to choose any options, and when you go onto the connected website recorder.google.com, they are there waiting for you, ready to copy-and-paste from or listen to.

The Plaud team has AI summaries and mind maps and are introducing more complex AI features down the road, but they need to focus on nailing down a simple, easy experience like this. It should auto-transcribe in a set default language, and then you can choose to use the more advanced features afterward if you like; but you can’t do that at the moment. Their device is built around easily and fluidly capturing thoughts, but the software feels so cumbersome that I stopped wanting to use it.

My hope, though, is that the team with Plaud can resolve this as they’ve already fixed some earlier issues. Namely, whereas you needed to pay for an ongoing subscription to transcribe any audio before, they have now given all users 300 minutes of transcription for free per month, and you can upgrade to a paid plan to go above that.

They’re also making their paid option more compelling as, in the future, you will be able to import other recorded audio to their transcription suite, and it will be able to distinguish between different speakers. If they add a Zoom plug-in so that the names of the speakers could be automatically imported to the transcript, that would make it a real competitor to services like Otter, Rev, and Meetgeek.

If they make some of the changes I’ve suggested above, that would be an easy recommendation for the $195 asking price as a voice memo device; and if the software is good enough, I would cancel my Otter subscription and move to Plaud Pro. But at the moment, it’s not there yet.