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“Most businesses are innovating with AI using data that’s already digitized on the internet,” Plaud CEO Nathan Su said at a press conference ahead of NotePin’s launch. “But in our real-world scenarios, there’s so much more data — what we say, what we hear, what we see.”
Do you understand this?
Transcribing your life is a noble task. A good voice recognition service can take care of a good deal of the long and tedious task of hand-transcribing interview and meeting notes. But as journalists who routinely use automated transcription services to type up interviews, these services aren’t perfect, often producing completely incorrect sentences, completely misspelling names, or messing up basic facts.
Avijit Ghosh, a policy researcher at AI company Hugging Face, points out that AI speech recognition has historically had trouble recognizing people who speak with certain accents, which can lead to misunderstandings (Hsu says this isn’t an issue raised by Plaud users). Add in the additional idiosyncrasies that generative AI systems can create through hallucinations, and you’re often left with no idea of what happened, even if it’s just a vague idea of what happened. This may be better than the types of transcriptions you had access to before, but it’s important to be aware of what limitations the tool has. Relying on that incomplete information to carry on with your work could lead to unpleasant misunderstandings or just plain embarrassment.
“They could completely fabricate something that has never been said before,” Ghosh said.
There are also security concerns that arise from relying on AI for business meetings and the large amount of information stored on wearable devices. Plaud says that while the cloud transcription and summarization service is encrypted by default, the device itself is not. If a user loses the device and someone steals it, they could potentially access the recordings stored on the device by connecting it to their computer. Hsu says this shouldn’t be an issue because NotePin uses a proprietary charging connector, so bad actors can’t access the device unless they have their own NotePin (by contrast, have you seen how far hackers will go to steal secrets?). NotePin also has a built-in “find it” feature that helps prevent loss. That said, it’s not a completely closed system.
“In that case, if you don’t take precautions and lose your device, it could be accessed,” Su says, “but that’s a very extreme case.”
Ultimately, Hsu has bigger ambitions for the company than work-focused devices, but he’s careful to point out that work-focused devices are the company’s focus right now, and he’s aware of the anxiety that this may cause.
“We have a grand vision: what would happen if users could record all of their daily conversations, even decades from now,” says Su. “We would constantly listen to them and learn about them, getting to know their personalities, preferences, and interactions over time. One day, we’ll be able to use AI to recreate ourselves and create a true digital twin. This is kind of a grand mission, and we think it would be amazing if we could help users connect with their many memories.”
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