China’s latest AI gadget is credit card-sized recorder as Alibaba’s DingTalk takes on Plaud

The latest artificial intelligence gadget in China is a credit-card sized note-taking recorder from Alibaba Group Holding’s DingTalk unit, as Chinese firms introduce rival products to Plaud, the popular AI note-taker developed by a US start-up.

Alibaba-backed workplace collaboration platform DingTalk last month unveiled an AI-powered voice recorder - able to record and transcribe voices and present them in various content formats such as minutes – joining a wave of Chinese tech firms that are baking AI into hardware products.

Unveiled in late August at a corporate event commemorating the 10th anniversary of the office tool, the DingTalk A1 recorder packs various AI capabilities – from meeting transcriptions and summaries to real-time translation in multiple languages – into a form factor of similar size and weight to a stack of several credit cards.

The recorder’s transcription capability was developed in partnership with Alibaba’s Tongyi AI lab, using over 100 million hours of audio content for training, enabling it to “understand” more than 100 languages and 30 Chinese dialects as well as jargon across 200 industries, DingTalk chief executive Chen Hang said at the unveiling of the gadget.

Its AI-powered multilingual ability makes it a personal “AI office assistant”, as the company described it, allowing any office worker to take meeting minutes, conduct real-time translation and summarise lengthy recordings without human intervention.

The DingTalk A1 comes in two models priced at 499 yuan (US$69.98) and 799 yuan. By comparison, the newly launched Plaud Note Pro is priced at US$179.