u/Illustrious-Buy-1088

Small team, no dedicated conference room, meetings happen wherever there's an open chair that day. Went through three AI note taker device options plus two software tools trying to figure out what actually helps a team this size track decisions across a hybrid week.

Hardware

1. Plaud NotePin S. Best for: teams where whoever's paying attention can flag a decision the second it happens. You press on the physical button, then that moment is marked, no scrubbing back through a full recording afterward. Cons: only works if someone remembers to press it, took a few meetings of everyone forgetting before it became a habit.
2. iFLYTEK AINOTE 2. Best for: teams that already write on a tablet during meetings.
   1.   Cons: Worth knowing what it actually is before you shortlist it though, it's a 10.65-inch e-ink tablet (around $649) with on-device transcription built in, not a small pocketable recorder.
3. Owl Labs Meeting Owl. Best for: a team with one permanent, fixed meeting room. 360° camera, 8-mic array, 18 ft pickup radius, genuinely impressive specs. Cons: it's a $1,099 device built to sit in the center of a table. A small team without a permanent room is exactly the use case it isn't built for.

Software

1. Fireflies.ai. Best for: teams whose stack is already unified around one project tool, since it auto-syncs decisions straight into it. Cons: agenda-free conversations get muddier summaries.
2. Otter.ai. Best for: fast onboarding, it's lighter and easier for new team members to pick up. Cons: still limited to whatever's happening inside a video call window.

The problem wasn't recording here, everyone here records fine. For me, it was finding the one decision in a 40-minute transcript nobody had time to reread, and that is Plaud NotePin S. For a small team with no fixed room, a one-press flag beat conference-grade gear and full auto-transcripts. For online meetings tho, the two software options work. For hybrid-week decision tracking, what would software+hardware combo would you choose?

Group project meetings were where I kept dropping the ball. Someone would assign me a section, I'd nod, then three days later realize I never wrote it down.

I tried recording on my phone once. Felt weird on the table, and I kept forgetting to hit record when the conversation moved fast.

A classmate mentioned he clips something to his shirt for client calls. That got me looking at wearables. I picked up a Plaud NotePin S and started wearing it clipped to my collar before group meetings. It's a wearable AI note taker, so I'm not fumbling with my phone mid-conversation.

Press to Highlight is what actually fixed it. When someone locks in a decision, like who presents which section, I tap the button once and that moment gets marked in the transcript. After the meeting I pull action items from the summary instead of reconstructing everything from half-finished notes.

Only rough part: if the clip sits wrong on a hoodie, quieter voices across the table get muddy. I adjust it before we start now.

Curious how others track action items when group meetings move faster than you can type. Still notes by hand or something else?