This pocket AI voice recorder took me back to the good old days of dictation (and shorthand)

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Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Senior Contributing Editor Senior Contributing Editor Aug. 29, 2026 at 3:30 a.m. PT Comulytic Note Pro AI voice recorder 4 / 5 Very good pros and cons Pros Mic pickup quality is excellent. Battery life is superb. The card is small, unobtrusive, and easy to use. Cons Not a fan of proprietary charging cables. The app works hard to upsell users to paid tiers -- and they're not cheap. I have lingering privacy concerns. View now at Amazon Follow ZDNET:  Add us as a preferred source  on Google.

I'm old enough to have been taught a bunch of skills that are now essentially dead. Shorthand is one of those skills that I learned and used, and has since been pushed out of my brain by "Simpsons" quotes. I look at the lines and squiggles now, and it makes absolutely no sense.

Another skill that's come and gone is dictation and transcription. I had a number of recorders over the years -- from tape to electronic -- and used them extensively. I've lost count of how many recorders have burst apart when they were dropped.

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Dictation and transcription gave way to speech-to-text software. I remember trying this in the late 1990s and feeling it had potential, but it was also frustrating. As someone taught to type, the keyboard was always quicker and cleaner... until recently.

Thanks to a hearty chomp from a disease-ridden Scottish tick, I've been left with a small amount of cramping and neuropathy in my hands. The symptoms are more annoying than debilitating, but they did leave me wondering if non-keyboard options had improved.

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This is the path that got me to try the Comulytic Note Pro AI Voice Recorder , a credit card-sized recorder that uses AI to organize your thoughts, meetings, and memos.

There are two parts to this system -- the physical recorder and the app that leverages AI to get things done.

A thin and light, highly unobtrusive voice recorder that leverages AI to transcribe and summarize your life.

Shaped like a small stack of credit cards, the Note Pro AI voice recorder measures approximately 3.37 x 2.04 x 0.12 inches and weighs just one ounce. It reminds me of the Bluetooth finder cards you buy for your wallet or purse, but as I'll get to shortly, it's missing one feature they have in common.

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It has a tiny 128 × 80-pixel display along one side, and a single button. A press starts off a recording, another press stops it.

The unit is packed with a triple-mic array featuring AI noise reduction, an effective range of up to 15 feet, and 64GB of internal storage for recordings.

Inside is a battery that offers 45 hours of continuous recording and a whopping 107 days of standby. It comes with a magnetic slip case that attaches to a smartphone and a proprietary charging cable that connects to the pins on the back of the card.

Then there's the app ( iOS / Android ), which is where the voice recordings go for AI processing. You can find an app for both iOS and Android, and connecting the recorder to the app is very easy to do.

Every recorder comes with a free Starter Plan that offers unlimited free transcription and basic AI summaries; however, advanced features such as Advanced Summary, Instant Abstract, and Ask Comulytic Assistant require a paid subscription starting at $10 a month.

The recordings are offloaded from the recorder to the app, where all the AI magic happens, and it becomes the hub for everything you do with the recorder.

And none of this AI is bespoke to Comulytic; the app leverages third-party services.

Comulytic claims that the recordings are encrypted using AES and that everything is done to meet  SOC 2 Type 2 ,  HIPAA ,  ISO 27001 ,  GDPR ,  CCPA , and  CPRA  requirements, and we will have to take their word for it.

I want to preface what follows with some caveats. First, note-taking, whether shorthand or voice notes or some AI-powered speech-to-text system, is very personal, and how I do it will almost certainly differ from how you do it. Keep that in mind.

Much like a notebook and pen, this sort of device is a blank slate, ready for the user to leave their mark. And just as a notebook's effectiveness depends on the quality of your handwriting, and how well you are at putting down your thoughts, this device here relies quite a lot on the clarity of your voice and thoughts. Some...