This voice recorder looks like a cassette tape and uses AI to transcribe 10 languages

The iFlytek Smart Recording Pen A1 can turn an hour’s worth of recordings into text within five minutes

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The Smart Recording Pen A1 is designed to clearly record sound from all directions up to 5 meters (16.4 feet) away. It also doesn’t look like a pen. (Picture: iFlytek)

Published: 6:59pm, 2 Jun 2020Updated: 6:59pm, 2 Jun 2020

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

If you’re starting to zone out after too many Zoom meetings, you might want to pay attention to the latest gadget from iFlytek.

The Smart Recording Pen A1 is a recorder that transcribes voice to text. It’s said to support 10 languages, including English, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. The company also says it supports 12 Chinese dialects, including Cantonese. It also looks nothing like a pen, though older people tell me it actually resembles something called a cassette tape.

The 399 yuan (US$56) gadget needs five minutes to transcribe each hour of content. It uses Bluetooth to connect to a smartphone app, which you can open to read the transcript. And don’t worry about your bilingual recordings: iFlytek says the Recording Pen can transcribe a person switching between Chinese and English words.

If you’re wondering why you can’t just use your phone to record and then pay to use iFlytek’s online transcription service… well, actually, you can. But iFlytek says its gadget has enough battery power to record 20 hours of uninterrupted speech and can store 32GB of recordings. That could be useful if you’re a secretary constantly going to corporate meetings or a student who wants a record of every lecture in a semester. Or a reporter with more than few interviews to transcribe.

To test iFlytek’s accuracy, I uploaded a three-minute English audio recording to its website using a free trial. It appears to live up to its 98% accuracy claim, missing only specific terms such as “Minecraft” and some words that were spoken from a distance and, to be fair, weren’t very clear. iFlytek says its algorithm can also translate foreign language transcripts into Chinese, but we weren’t able to test this feature without paying.