A:Answer ✅ What Plaud does:
Plaud is a portable AI recorder (often marketed as “Plaud Note”) — it records audio, stores it in its app, and offers AI transcription via its own cloud service, which is the main reason people buy it.
⚠️ The catch:
Plaud’s free plan is extremely limited — they make money on the transcription service, not just the recorder hardware. If you don’t pay for Plaud’s subscription, you’ll only get a small amount of free transcription minutes per month (usually ~5–10 minutes). Beyond that, you’re pushed into their paid plan.
✅ Good news:
Yes, you can use Plaud to just record audio — then export the audio file (usually MP3 or WAV) to your computer or phone and transcribe it somewhere else for free (like Whisper or ChatGPT).
Plaud’s app lets you download your raw recordings — you just have to skip their cloud transcription and manually upload your file to your preferred AI tool.
⚙️ How this works in practice:
Record your meeting with Plaud.
Open the Plaud app, export or share the audio file (most people use email, AirDrop, or cloud storage).
Upload that file to:
A free Whisper web tool (like Whisper on Hugging Face).
Or use your own local Whisper install.
Or drop the file into ChatGPT if you have file upload enabled (for Plus/Pro users).
No Plaud subscription needed if you skip their built-in transcription.
✅ Bottom line
✔️ Yes, you can record with Plaud + transcribe with ChatGPT or Whisper = no subscription required.
✔️ You just won’t get Plaud’s convenience of auto-upload-and-transcribe.
✔️ And you’ll need to do the manual step of moving the file.
