Viaim RecDot AI Recording Wireless Earbuds (Review)

AI recording devices have been flooding the market with options from companies like Plaud.ai and Boya, each coming with features that help capture important meetings and conversations so that you can go back to review them later or summarize them into helpful documents or archives. Although many of these devices prove to be quite useful, none have stood out like the Viaim RecDot AI Recording Wireless Earbuds.

In most cases, these recording devices act as an additional device you have to drag around with you, waiting for the moment when you might need to use it. This means one more device in your pocket or bag. But what if that device could be implemented into something you already bring with you everywhere? This would reduce the amount of stuff you have to carry around and serve more than one purpose.

This is what Viaim is looking to achieve, and the company seems to have delivered the perfect solution in the form of earbuds. Thanks to the design of true wireless earbuds, it has never been easier to drag around earbuds everywhere you go. Earbuds typically come with a long list of useful features now, including things like environmental or active noise cancellation, EQ adjustments, and more. So why not also build AI recording/archiving into them as well?

The Viaim RecDot earbuds easily fit into your pocket or bag like any other small true wireless earbud solution. But they also come with just about everything you’d find from devices like the Plaud recorders (and others). They can record full meetings, simple conversations, and phone calls. All while also providing AI interaction, summarization, and even mind maps. Oh, and they function like any normal earbuds for media and phone calls.

The buds offer two options for capturing content. You can easily record phone calls by pinching and holding one of the stems for a few seconds (while in a call) until it says “recording started.” The notification is also heard on the other end so that everyone in the party knows they are being recorded (this is to abide by various app store and privacy policies). You can also do this outside of a phone call to capture a conversation in person, like any other AI recording device.

Then, you can also use them while the buds are still in their charging case. You simply slide the cover open and hit the red button. When you do, one of the status LEDs for “L” or “R” (in our case, it is always the left bud) will light up red, confirming that recording has started. The case (with the buds inside) is now a recording device and is capturing the room.

At first, everything is recorded directly to the buds (locally). Then, when you open the app on your phone, you can transfer the saved conversations to the phone (locally). At this point, nothing has gone into the cloud or any other external location. From here, you can listen to the recording all you want. Nothing is “shared” outside of your phone until you hit transcribe (for this, the cloud is clearly needed so that AI can do its job).

When you hit transcribe, the magic begins to happen. It will transcribe everything into text. It will also create a summary of the conversation/meeting with highlighted key points, as well as a to-do list (if applicable to the conversation/meeting), and even a mind map. The above two images show a simple result when calling a colleague to make sure both parties can hear the “recording started” message. It also allowed us to make sure it was capable of clearly recording a phone call.

You can also trigger recording while using the Viaim app (Android/iOS), which is also the central source for syncing, reviewing, and transcribing everything. It even has its own AI chatbot that allows you to ask questions and interact with your various recordings. This helps you to isolate key points within your meetings or create additional sub-summarizations.

The app is surprisingly simple to use. It doesn’t take a lot of learning to work your way through the options. It even provides recording tips and an eartip fit test to make sure you are making use of the best silicone tips and earbud position for the shape of your ears.

Users can also specify which AI models are used (the default is ChatGPT 4.1 at the time of writing this), in case you want to switch over to something like Google Gemini.

This is also where you can customize the earbuds for general listening. The app will provide you with battery life information for each bud and control over the various features. You can enable dual device connectivity (ie, laptop and phone), choose from several premade EQ options (or create your own), and adjust the noise cancellation settings.

When it comes to general listening (music, video content, etc), the earbuds offer a typical experience that could potentially come close to something like entry-level Apple AirPods. Sound quality is higher than average, but not incredibly high-res or anything. We found that something like the 1MORE Evo True Wireless buds can sound a bit better and offer better noise cancellation. However, those buds do fall into a higher price range than these would if you were to take the AI features out of the Viaim. So it feels fairly balanced there since the 1MORE buds are just simple buds with no AI recording abilities. I’m sure if the Viaim buds offered that level of sound, they would fall around $249-$299.

When it comes to phone calls, the Viaim RecDot AI Recording Wireless Earbuds offer a crisp conversation for both parties. This is important since the quality of your AI records would heavily depend on this. So, thankfully, these buds do great for conversations.

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They are also easy to use when it comes to their touch-controls. Instead of the outside surface of the bud being the touch-sensitive button (where you’d be poking yourself in the ear hole, which can get uncomfortable with some buds), it is the stem that has the touch area. You pinch the stem in various ways to control your music or phone calls. The touch patterns are similar to those of any other buds outside of the long-press, which triggers recording.

The buds also offer voice control, which is said to be disabled by default. In our case, it was enabled by default. This is something that could be considered relatively new for buds since few offer this feature. You can control your content by saying things like “play music”, “stop playing”, “play next song”, “volume down”, and more. You can even reject an incoming call by saying “Reject the call”, which is useful. This was fun, but the use of these features is clearly limited to your environment.

As for noise cancellation, it is useful to have any form of ANC in earbuds or headphones. Like most, you can configure it to be on or off, or place it in transparency mode so that you can listen to your environment while using the buds. As mentioned, the ANC isn’t as exciting as some buds, but it is noticeable. It just heavily requires the buds to be perfectly inserted, have the best tips installed for the shape of your ears, and to be perfectly rotated so that they create as much of a seal as possible.

For ANC, we base our expectations on the price of the product, which requires us to guess how much the buds would cost without the AI features, which we assume would be sub-$100. So we wouldn’t expect too much from ANC outside of basic run-of-the-mill ANC performance.

Now, if we had our way, we’d say audio quality and ANC are the two things that would make this a perfect product. Again, it would likely drive the price up a little, but there are more than enough people out there who would be willing to pay for that. So the perfect product would be a balance between these buds and something like the 1MORE Evo or Bose QuietComfort Ultra buds. And I am sure the company is considering the option if these do well in the market as-is.

Battery life is great. You can enjoy up to 36 hours of battery life when using the case to keep them topped off between uses. This is actually a very common expectation with earbuds, but it is nice to see it remains a number, even with these additional features (I guess this is mostly since your phone is doing a lot of the work post-capture).

And finally, before we get to some more testing of the AI, we have to point out the subscription options of the buds. This is where things could get dangerous, as it could alienate a lot of people who might not commonly need to use these all the time. This is also something the company gets right. That being said, you get up to 600 minutes of transcription free a month. Anything beyond that will require a subscription. This is more than reasonable when you compare a basic consumer to someone who needs this professionally in their day-to-day lives.

AI Recording Tests

So, now we wrap things up by focusing on the most important feature, the AI recording/transcription. Fair warning ahead of time, we did get a little goofy in our testing. So, try not to be taken aback by some of the words in one of the demos we offer below.

As mentioned, it did a great job of recording both parties clearly in the previous example, where we had a short phone call to see if the “recording started” message would be heard by both parties. The resulting AI transcript was flawless. The only thing we ran into was that the “recorded started” message wasn’t as obvious to the other person as they said it sounded more like “the party started” due to call quality or compression. Regardless, it did its job, and the resulting text in the app was great.

We then picked a random commercial number to call and chose Cox Communications since it typically has a long intro to its automated menu, filled with spam about the things you can pay Cox for (ie, digital phone service, internet, etc). We triggered the recording and waited about 30 seconds or so until it finally got to the options menu, and ended the call. It then transcribed everything into what looked like the results of a sales meeting. Highlighting key points and summarizing the “conversation” of what Cox offers its customers. This can be seen in the above two images.

Of course, we commonly give in to our inner child. So these demos weren’t enough. We wanted to see how it would react to something awkward or unusual, to see if it would still accomplish its job. So we decided to create a mock meeting in the style of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” This is where my previous warning comes into play. If you are grossed out by mild stuff, you can skip ahead to the conclusion.

We kept the two buds in their case and triggered them to record. We then continued to randomly improvise (improve comedy) our way through a conversation about someone looking to pitch their product to an investor. The buds were about 20 inches from person #1, and about 6-8 feet from person #2. This was the resulting conversation (recorded by the buds):

As mentioned, this was a mock conversation using pure improv. Incredibly over the top and goofy, and yet, would the buds still keep things serious and do their job? The answer is yes.

The performance of the AI was flawless in its transcription. We even triggered it in the settings to break the conversation down between person #1 and person #2. It also provided a great summary of key points, as well as a to-do list and a mind map. You can read through the summarized key points here:

As you can see, the resulting text is hilarious, yet incredibly precise based on the communication it captured. The buds took their job quite seriously.

Due to the nature of the conversation, we almost scrapped this to move on to another test that was more serious and boring in nature. However, the uncontrollable laughter that resulted from our team reading through the results made it hard not to include this.

Especially since it proves one major thing. That is, a professional could get a lot of use out of something like this. But even if you don’t have a need for it, many people will find the sudden desire to own one of these after reading through something like that, just because of how fun it sounds to play with something like this. Just look at what you’d be missing out on! That, and who wouldn’t benefit from being able to record their phone calls?

Our Conclusion

So are these buds worth buying into? Absolutely. I used to record calls on a personal level before Android started cracking down on the feature within its app store. It eventually opened the possibility for developers to do it again, as long as the app makes it obvious to both parties, which is perfectly acceptable, and these buds do just that.

But to be able to record your environment for things like meetings and to have the ability to transcribe, summarize, and dig deeper into the information is priceless for professionals. I heavily wish I had something like this in a past job, a long time ago, where the power of CYA within meetings was a survival skill. Not to mention the ability to summarize long meetings into simple key points so that nothing gets missed.

Also, we felt that the general sound quality of the earbuds was acceptable for the price point when you consider how much they would cost as just normal buds and no AI features. You can still enjoy them for hours while listening to music or watching video content.

Now, we’d just love to see a really hi-res version of the buds for those who look for the best in their buds for music/video content. It would be more expensive for sure ($50-$100 more, likely), but that is a conversation for another day, if a premium model ever launches.

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Are you a manufacturer or distributor that would like us to test something out for review? Contact us and we can let you know where to send the product and we will try it out.