Comulytic Note Pro | ★★★★☆ | £128 (plus optional subscriptions)

Every journalist has had that dreaded moment: you leave an interview, click play on the recorder – or, more likely, tap your phone – and… nothing. The worst silence in the world. The interview didn’t record.

Over a couple of decades in the game, this has happened to me a handful of times but none worse than the time I interviewed a proper A-lister, a man once tipped to play Bond, only to discover something went wrong with the recording. Just 40 minutes of low, unusable crackle. I remember sitting on the kerb desperately trying to write down everything he’d said so I wouldn’t have to break it to my editor that I’d screwed the pooch. To this day I now always bring two recording devices to big interviews, usually my phone and my trusty – but massive – iPad Pro.

So when I saw the new wave of dinky little AI transcription devices, I was keen to take one for a spin.

The Comulytic Note Pro AI voice recorder review

Enter the Comulytic Note Pro, which is one of my favourite gadgets of the year. The first thing you notice about this little recorder is its size. It’s the rough dimensions of three stacked credit cards, and weighs about the same. 

It’s crafted from brushed aluminium – de rigueur in new tech since Apple started using it in the early 2000s – with a tiny little LED screen, a play/pause/record button and not a whole bunch else. Mine comes in a shade Comulytic will not be allowed to call Cosmic Orange but is clearly designed to complement the iPhone 17 Pro, about whose colour I positively gushed this time last year.

It’s also supplied with a neat little black wallet that snaps to the back of your iPhone. I’m sold: but what does it actually ?

Well, pair it with your phone through the companion app, hit the record button (a two second press) and it starts taping your conversations. It then automatically – and immediately – syncs the conversation to the app, where you then have a few options.

As I’m using it for journalism – mostly recording one-on-one conversations – I have mostly been using the basic, free tier, which uses AI to generate a transcript of your conversations. It works about as well as any transcription software I’ve tried – Otter has been my go-to but I didn’t notice a big drop-off in quality with the Note Pro. And, as I need to store all my recordings in case someone tries to sue me, I was pleased with how easy it is to export both the written transcripts and the audio files.

Advancer options include translation

More advanced options include the ability to translate what people are saying into other languages (113 of them, including Sudanese and Malay), although for that you’ll have to subscribe to the premium tier (£10 a month), which comes with unlimited translation and “insights” into your audio recordings. There’s also an Elite tier (£29.99 a month), which offers an additional AI agent who can access your emails and create slides and documents.

The paid tiers can also analyse your transcripts and offer insights and action points, which would probably be useful if you were using your Note Pro for meetings rather than interviews. But the fact you can get unlimited free transcription is perfect for me, especially when most of Comulytic’s rivals cap the number of free minutes you get per month (although the inability to turn off the links asking for money is a little annoying).

The battery is supposedly good for 45 hours of continuous recording – after trialling it for a few weeks, I’m still sitting on two bars. 

And… there’s not much else to say, really. I came to the Note Pro looking for a second recording device and what I got was… a second recording device, albeit one with more AI bells and whistles than I will ever use. And at £128, it falls nicely into the “treat yourself” category – a nice little present that won’t tip you into the red.

I also tried out the more expensive and more capable Comulytic Action Pro, which does everything the Note Pro does but is even more skewed towards being an all-encompassing digital assistant, specialising in turning your transcripts into slideshows or emails or… whatever you like, really.

It has six microphones compared to the Note’s two and its battery lasts for 70 hours. It also has a built-in magnet, so it can clip firmly to your phone without a wallet. But it’s not made from orange brushed aluminium and it’s not the size of a stack of credit cards and if I had to choose one, I’d pick the entry level Note Pro every time.

• Both devices are available from the Comulytic store – tap here to visit the website