AI-powered transcription devices: EurekaMind vs Plaude
Published on October 5, 2026
As far as I know Plaude were one of the first movers in the dedicated recording and transcription device space. But if the show floor at IFA was anything to go by, the space is rapidly filling up with competitors or as someone at Plaude put it, “copy cats”.
One of those new entrants is EurekaMind, which is either the same company as, or in partnership with NoteGPT. In this post I compare the two of them, as well as comparing both devices to just using your phone or laptop to do the same thing.
The devices
I have a Plaude Note from last year, and a EurekaMind from this year. The EurekaMind has magsafe built in, and the Plaude needs a sticky magnetic ring or an extra case, which adds some weight. The EurekaMind charges via a USB-C cable, while the Plaude uses a custom charger.
The €20 more expensive Plaude Pro has a small LCD screen, but still also uses the custom charger and has no inbuilt magsafe.
Those differences aside, they are fairly similar devices, but so are most devices designed to attach to the back of your phone, as anything non-card-like would be inconvenient.
Here’s how the two compare, based on the manufacturer’s published specs I could find.
| Plaud Note | EurekaMind 2.0 | |
|---|---|---|
| Dimensions / weight | 85.6 × 54.1 × 2.99 mm, 30 g | 3 mm thick, 29 g (full dimensions not published) |
| Materials | Aluminium alloy | Not published |
| Microphones | 2 MEMS, 1 VPU | A multi-microphone array plus a bone-conduction mic that detects phone vibration and call audio from the handset path. The number of mics is not published. |
| Pickup range | Up to 3 m | Claimed up to about 10 m with smart noise reduction |
| Recording modes | Dual-mode recording, switching between phone calls and meetings | Physical side switch: up selects call recording via the bone-conduction path; down selects ambient recording with the built-in environmental mics |
| Controls | Tactile record button, press to highlight | Long-press the front button for 3 seconds to start recording. Press and hold the Corner Action Key for a quick idea capture. During recording, a short press adds a timestamp marker. |
| Display | None | 0.96-inch LCD showing recording and connection status |
| Battery | 400 mAh, up to 30 hours of continuous recording, 60 days standby | 400 mAh, up to 30 days standby and up to 30 hours of continuous recording (loop-recording mode) |
| Storage | 64 GB | 64 GB |
| Connectivity | Bluetooth (BLE 5.2) and Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz) | Bluetooth pairing via the app. The version and whether it has Wi-Fi are not published. |
| Charging | Magnetic charging cable | Standard USB Type-C |
| Apple Find My | No | Not mentioned |
| Languages | Not covered in the sources I checked | 18 speech-to-text languages and translation across 138 languages |
| In the box | Magnetic case, magnetic ring and charging cable | Varies by SKU |
| Price (USD) | $159 | $149 single, $288 for two, $427 for three |
Onboarding
In both cases, to fully use the devices and the platform that supports them, you need to create an account and pair the device to a phone with Bluetooth. After that, generally, Bluetooth aside, the phone should find the device each time you want to sync it.
Usage
In both cases, you start a recording by pressing the large round button on the device, or by triggering it via the app. Pressing the button on the Plaude typically starts a recording instantly. On the EurekaMind it works the same way, but feels a little less responsive, sometimes needing a loner press to get things recording. The same applies with stopping the recording.
The Plaude Note shows a red light when it is recording, and the EurekaMind shows on the LCD screen, which sleeps after a few seconds, but tapping the button wakes it up. The LCD shows the recording time and the battery level, and there’s a waveform, but it doesn’t seem to have any relation to the audio its recording.
When I am travelling, I live by two rules, one of which is “always be charging”, so I never really tested the full extent of the battery life of either device, but after hours of use, neither went below about 95%.
The Plaude has an extra slider that switches between ambient and phone call recording, whereas the EurekaMind has a slider on the side of the device to do the same thing.
The EurekaMind has one extra button in the top right corner that serves two purposes. Click it once to mark key points during a recording and press and hold it to capture quick recordings.
To sync recordings from the device to your account you can connect the device via Bluetooth or the USB cable, which is faster. It feels like syncing the EurekaMind is slightly faster, but hard to tell. The Plaude app has a notification that shows you syncing progress.
That aside, I feel like the sync process between the EurekaMind lost one recording, as I spent most of my testing time running both simultaneously, but I could be wrong, as it only happened once and I could have forgotten to start a recording.
The apps
Recording with the devices is technically a small part of the offering, as doing something with the recordings is their main purpose.
In both cases, the mobile app is the main way to interact with recordings, and there are also web interfaces. Plaude lists a desktop app, but it’s only for recording to your account, not for working with the recordings. Plaude also recently added an MCP server and a CLI tool to make working with agents easier.
Before diving into the apps, I want to cover subscription costs as this is one of the main differences between the two devices and services.
Plaude has four plan tiers, but every device includes 300 minutes free. The paid tiers don’t add any extra features aside from enterprise-level admin tools on the enterprise tier. They just add extra minutes. So for light or occasional use, such as recording events, the free tier may be enough for you.
EurekaMind doesn’t have any paid tiers, and is somewhat unclear on the exact details of what’s offered, but my pro account claims to have 99999 minutes of recording time, which is a lot of minutes. That said, I do prefer the clarity of the Plaude pricing, whereas with EurekaMind, i have the feeling plans might be “subject to change” at some point.
Plaude interfaces
By default, Plaude doesn’t generate transcriptions or summaries, I guess to not spend your minutes on recordings you don’t need. When you do decide to generate a summary, Plaude has two options. Auto mode does everything for you, and a custom mode lets you configure a template for the summary, speaker labels, language, and the AI model.
For most of my conference recordings, Plaude selected the “panel discussion” template, which makes sense and was pretty helpful. You can use the same recording and transcription with multiple templates, which transform the transcriptions into different formats. Within the summaries, you can add your own sections, make edits, and move blocks around.
You can invite others to collaborate on the summaries, with varying levels of access and also export the summary and original audio in different formats.
Like many tools these days, Plaude has an AI assistant that prefills some interesting prompts to interrogate the transcriptions with and some pre-defined skills, everything from creating infographics to drafting a follow-up email.
You can use the same AI assistant to work across all of your recordings, which could be useful for pulling out key points from a group of recordings from an event, for example, for a highlights blog post.
Plaude recently added MCP and CLI tools, which can offer a broad range of connectivity and use case options, for pulling out themes from notes into blog drafts, or using the CLI to pipe the transcriptions into other tools.
EurekaMind interfaces
The transcriptions by default in EurekaMind are much more barebones. For example, Plaude extracted the speaker names, EurekaMind doesn’t and editing a transcript drops you into a markdown editor. While there are templates for meeting notes and the like, they aren’t as thorough as Plaude’s. It offers some additional features, such as creating infographics and mind maps of the transcriptions and has a few more export options than Plaude.
EurekaMind’s AI assistant also prefills prompts to interrogate the transcriptions with, but doesn’t offer any skills. It offers an assistant at note and global level, but the global assistant doesn’t really offer much until you connect it to a specific note. You cannot change the model it uses.
Summary
If you are looking for pure transcription device without too many additional features, a platform that may add more features in the future, and you think you need more than 300 minutes of transcription per month, then EurekaMind may be enough. Plaude is more established and mature as a product and platform, and the CLI and MCP tools especially are a big plus.
However, a bigger question to me is with transcription tools rapidly maturing and on-device AI models on many modern phones, do you need any dedicated device at all? Not having a hit to your battery is helpful, but is it worth it?
If you like what you're reading, support my work
Unify all of your calendars. Say goodbye to double-bookings and missed updates. And more.
Download Fantastical