Plaud Note Pro: hands-on review

Your setup

I use the Plaud Note Pro on the unlimited annual plan, which costs about £260 a year. It means every conversation, whether a phone call, a face-to-face meeting or a Teams meeting, can be recorded in full. I've had it for about two years.

What made you try it

I wanted to cut down the admin that comes with advising day to day. We all know what good looks like and what notes need to cover. With Plaud you can tell it what good looks like, and it produces full mortgage notes and a fact find. More importantly, if something got missed in the natural flow of the conversation, it highlights it, so I can go back to the customer.

What you use it for

All types of calls: fact finds, review calls, general phone calls and mortgage recommendations. It takes the conversation, transcribes it in full and turns it into compliance-ready notes I can upload to the fact find.

What happens when a meeting ends

I've set up workflows in Plaud, so each recording is transcribed automatically based on the type of call. It recognises whether it was a fact find, a general meeting, a protection meeting or a mortgage meeting, applies the right template and has the notes ready within minutes.

How accurate the transcripts are

Spot on. I've never had an issue with lender names, mortgage terms or accents. It gets the odd street name wrong, but you can find every instance in the notes and correct them all in one go.

Another useful function

Because it's linked into my workflows, when a customer gets in touch it can use the information already held to give me a short summary of them. If someone hasn't been in touch for a while, I can see straight away where they are, what they were doing and what we last discussed.

After the meeting

After every fact find I still like to put things into writing in my own words. Plaud also gives me a steady audit trail by email, which then goes into the CRM.

Time saved

Writing up meeting notes used to take me 30 minutes to an hour. On transcribing and note taking alone I save at least an hour or two per case. Add in fact-find notes, mortgage and protection recommendations and flagging anything missing, and on average it saves two to four hours per case. Over a week that gives me back about a day, depending on how many customers I'm speaking to. The real gain is efficiency: I spend that time talking to customers.

Telling clients you're recording

I tell them the call is being recorded. Nobody has ever had an issue with it. The feedback I get is that customers are comfortable with the follow-up email confirming everything, because it shows we understood them properly.

Data security and storage

My network is happy for it to be used as long as it meets all GDPR requirements. The FCA has no AI-specific guidance at the moment, so the onus sits with networks and individual firms to make sure tools meet GDPR and customer data requirements. Plaud does, and it holds itself to some of the highest standards out there.

What frustrates you

The search. If you have a customer in mind, you have to be very specific at the moment to find them. I understand a fix is on the way to make this much easier.

What you'd want added

More integration with the systems we use, with CRMs probably being the next step, or an end-to-end option.

Who it suits best

Sole advisers, small firms of a couple of people, and to be honest some bigger firms too. I think it's a great tool for newer advisers and busy teams. Newer advisers in particular gather a lot of information and have a lot to check across the fact find and recommendation. You can tell Plaud what good looks like and it tells you whether you've covered everything, asked enough questions, or need to go back to the customer. From a compliance point of view that feedback is instant, instead of waiting until the case is checked. The trade-off is that it takes time to set up and feed in your compliance notes and updates, but once that's done it's very quick.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

I'd like more room to add context about who you are and what you do. Compliance notes, for example, are typed in and limited by space, and networks give us a lot of guides and FAQs. Being able to upload actual documents without a character limit would help. Other than that it's a fantastic product and the time saving is huge. As with any change, it takes a little while to get used to, but once you do the output is excellent. If it doesn't quite match your style, you edit it, tell it, and it keeps learning every time.

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