// 9TO5GOOGLE — MOBILE & WEB
Comu’s Action Pro is a great meeting recorder that struggles to justify its AI premium
As my house becomes increasingly strewn with the detritus of parenting, I’ve made the inverse effort to eliminate excess, physical and digital, from my life. As much as it is about control, it’s also about mental health; I already use my phone too much, so adding yet another thing to the backpack, to the pocket, feels anything but additive.
But I’m also aware of the single-use gadget’s pull, increasingly powerful precisely because people are relying too much on their phones. Digicams to augment overly-processed smartphone photos. Writing tablets that feel like paper without the waste. Smart rings and health trackers to reduce notification overload.
And so it is with a product like the Comu Action Pro, a standalone note-taking gadget that attempts to turn a simple idea into something indispensable.
Pixel owners are likely well aware of the superlative built-in Recorder app that’s been around for years, adding features like real-time transcription and translation as it’s matured. The current app is about all you could want from a piece of software that leverages a phone’s built-in microphones.
It was with this framing that I undertook the review of a novel gadget category: the AI voice recorder. I’m not entirely unfamiliar with it: I’ve used early versions of Plaud’s NotePin and Note devices in the past, but never for long enough to feel acquainted with them. In response, I wanted to spend enough time with the Comu Action Pro to understand where and how it fits into my life, and why one may feel justified in spending the $180 it currently costs instead of just using the phone they already have in their pocket.
First, the basics: at a thickness of 7mm, it’s a svelte mixture of aluminum and plastic that’s designed to stick magnetically to the back of a compatible phone, like an iPhone or Pixel. (The box comes with a couple of circular magnetic stickers for devices without built-in MagSafe support.) That said, it’s nowhere close to the 3mm dimensions of the Plaud Note and Note Pro. But that additional girth comes with a few benefits: it fits a USB-C port, so you’re not forced to charge it with a proprietary magnetic cable that will almost certainly be missing when you need it most. And it carries a larger battery that pushes recording time to 70 hours, double that of the Plaud Note Pro.
The primary question I ask myself, and am asked by others, when I use the Comu Action Pro is, “Why?” Why do you need a separate piece of hardware when your phone will suffice, particularly in a world of inexpensive or free AI transcription services that can do most of the job? In short, it’s the passivity of it all; you can just leave the Action Pro running in the background whenever you’re going about your day to collect snippets of conversations, or covertly place it on a boardroom table to record a meeting.
The Action Pro has six far-field microphones that pick up voices from distances that phones are just not tuned for. That omnidirectional nature means the actual recordings sound thin and tinny, but the product is not the audio — it’s the data from the audio. Placing the Action Pro on the table in front of me next to my phone and recording the deliberately subdued tones of a conversation I was having showed the form factor’s inherent compromise; it picked up voices from the tables next to me, leading to audio that was basically unusable to listen to. Conversely, my Pixel 11 Pro did a great job isolating our two voices in the recording itself.
I was surprised, then, to discover the Action Pro transcribed our conversation with minimal errors. The company works with a number of AI vendors, including OpenAI and Google, and while it’s usually accurate, it made more errors than the competition.
It’s the “Action” in Comu’s Action Pro the company really wants to emphasize, and it’s what I believe has the largest potential — and the longest way to go to reach it. If you’ve ever used a cloud-based meeting recorder like Granola you’ll know that i