- The best place for AI to create real, repeated value isn’t consumer novelty — it’s work.
- What work needs isn’t another transcript. It needs privacy and collaboration built in from the first second.
- We started with a device because the moments most worth capturing are the ones you shouldn’t be looking at your phone. But hardware is the entry point, not the product.
Every few weeks, someone asks me a version of the same question: PLAUD already exists. There are dozens of SaaS meeting tools. Why build another one?
It’s fair. And my honest answer usually surprises people: we’re not building a recorder.
We’re not building a recorder
Yes, LIVVO starts with a device you can hold in your hand. But the device was never the point. To explain why we’re here, I have to start with what we actually believe.
The best place for AI to land is work
Consumer AI is having its moment — image generators, chatbots, clever demos. It’s fun. But the place AI can create real, repeated, measurable value isn’t entertainment. It’s the ordinary work that runs a company: the sales call, the project meeting, the decision made in a room that then has to actually happen.
That’s where we planted ourselves. And once you commit to work — not consumers, not novelty — two things stop being features and become the whole foundation.
What work needs isn’t another transcript — it’s privacy and collaboration
Privacy. The conversations that matter most at work are the most sensitive: customer calls, deal terms, strategy, sometimes medical or legal detail. You can’t pour that into a consumer gadget or a cloud you don’t control and call it done. For us privacy isn’t a toggle buried in settings — it’s a product decision. You choose what’s captured, uploaded, kept, and deleted.
Collaboration. A recording that lives on one person’s device is a dead end. Work is a team sport. The value doesn’t appear when a conversation is captured — it appears when that conversation becomes something the whole team can safely use: the decisions, the action items, the context the next person needs. A tool that stops at “here’s your transcript” has done the easy 20% and left the hard 80% to you.
So why hardware?
Because of one stubborn truth: the conversations most worth capturing are exactly the moments you shouldn’t be looking at your phone. The sentence where a client finally says what they really need. The moment a meeting actually decides something. The instant you unlock your phone, open an app, and tap record — you’ve already left the conversation. You’re documenting it and missing it at the same time. An app forces a trade between being present and capturing. A device removes that trade. One button, or nothing at all — and you never leave the room.
Hardware is the entry point, not the destination
But here’s the part I want to be clear about: hardware is how we get in the door. It is not our future. The device owns the capture moment. Our mission lives in everything after — turning that conversation into something private, collaborative, and genuinely usable at work. The hardware is the entry point, not the destination.
What customers told us
I wasn’t sure the market would hear the difference. Then something told me we were right: the more openly we said this, the more customers came to us — not for a gadget, for the idea. Enterprises kept telling us the same thing in their own words: the recording and meeting tools they’d tried didn’t connect to their actual work, so they didn’t meet their real needs. They didn’t want another recorder. They wanted the thing the recorder was supposed to lead to.
So no — we didn’t build another app, and we didn’t build just another recorder. We started with a device because work deserves to be captured without friction. But what we’re really building is where AI finally belongs: at work, in a way that respects your privacy and moves with your team.
The device is just the beginning of that.