On the evening of October 20, I sat at my computer watching Dedao's autumn product launch livestream.

First came a book, then a course. The last thing they brought out was the recording desk, priced at 2,499 yuan.

When the livestream ended, I closed the window. I did not buy it.

A year ago, that would have been easy to understand. I paint. What use would I normally have for meeting notes? But things are different now. I work with AI every day. Recording, transcribing, organizing: I do these things daily. By rights, I should be among the people this machine is best suited to.

I watched the whole presentation, thought about it for a few days, and still did not place an order.

First, what is good about it

The most valuable thing about this machine is that it is separate from your phone.

That may sound obvious, but anyone who has recorded things knows how much it matters. When I record on my phone, I have to think about the battery and storage. A call comes in halfway through, a message pops up, or I accidentally open another app, and the recording stops. I have experienced all of these. Many people do not want to record things because recording is so easily interrupted. Once it stops, they cannot be bothered to start again.

The recording desk is a separate piece of hardware. Press start, and it stays there recording. Your phone can ring beside it without affecting it. Its eight-meter pickup range is enough for a small office. You do not have to prepare anything before recording, or divide your attention to look after it while it records.

That freedom from having to look after it is its real selling point.

Compared with the earlier recording card, the recording desk adds a screen. That screen is useful when several people are talking. The conversation circles back, and you want to check what was said earlier. Look up, and there it is. No waiting. With a recording card, you finish recording, upload to the cloud, and then go back to read it. There is a step in between. One step is not much, but around a meeting table, that step is an interruption.

So it is not simply a better voice recorder. It takes the job of keeping a record out of your hands and gives it to something dedicated to doing it.

All you have to do is talk.

Who is it for, then

When they presented the product, they used their own office as the example. Luo Zhenyu, Tuobuhua, Kuaidao Qingyi: three or four people in one room, discussing things all day. Ideas pop up at any moment, memorable lines come and go. In that situation, the best way to keep a record is not to do any recording yourself. Let the machine sit there doing it.

Picture it. Several people are deep in conversation. Nobody suddenly stops to pull out a phone and say, hold on, let me write this down. If someone did, the mood would break. But put something on the table that stays on, and the discussion carries on as usual. Afterwards, you have a complete set of notes to look back through. The difference is whether the discussion can continue uninterrupted.

It does one more thing after recording. It generates the notes, and everyone at the meeting can tap their phone using NFC to receive the same context. Nobody has to go back and explain everything again. That design really does seem to have grown out of a practical difficulty, rather than a feature someone dreamed up out of nowhere.

So my judgment is that it is a good tool. The problem it solves is real, and it is the kind of problem a small team runs into every day. I acknowledge that.

Having acknowledged that, I still did not buy it

The most direct reason is that I already have two recording cards.

Here is how I ended up with two. The first one was for my mom. I wanted her to be able to record things as they came to her. She took it home for a month or two and barely used it. She had no situation where she felt she really had to record something, and had not yet developed the habit. The card sat unused.

It happened to be just when I could use it myself. Over the past two months, I have watched a lot of livestreams and taken classes. Sometimes two things I wanted to hear happened at the same time, and one card could not cover both. So I took Mom's card. With both running, one could record this session and the other that one, without missing either.

Normally, I keep one at home and carry the other. At home, I can press it whenever I need to. When I go out, I put one in my pocket and say whatever comes to mind.

So when I looked at the recording desk, my first reaction was: isn't this essentially my two cards rolled into one, with a screen added on top?

In terms of functions, that is more or less it. Audio capture, transcription, summaries: I already have everything it offers. What it adds beyond the cards is the screen, so I can look up and see the text while recording, or scroll back when several people are talking.

That screen is useful. But I have an iPad. Set the iPad on the table, open the software, and start a meeting with several people, and the live text is there on the screen. Scrolling back through the context is just as convenient. I already have that interface. I do not need to buy another device to get it.

So what this machine would actually add for me is almost zero.

It is not that I have no use for recording when I am on my own. It is just a fairly light use. I have no office, no colleagues, no stream of quotable lines appearing out of nowhere. Most of my talking during the day is recording a reflection on my phone or explaining a request to AI. For that, two cards are enough. The iPad is enough.

In the end, there was the price. At 2,499 yuan, it does not just offer recording. The e-ink screen can also serve as an e-reader. But I do not subscribe to Dedao's e-book service. For reading, I have a Kindle that I have used for years. That leaves half of this machine's abilities sitting idle for me.

A good tool, paired with something I already have and a function I would not use.

So I did not order it straight away. But I did not immediately put it out of my mind either. What kept me thinking for a few days was another question.

Are those few minutes saved worth more than two thousand yuan?

What does the recording desk save compared with a recording card? You can see the words there and then, without waiting for the upload to the cloud. You can tap with NFC to sync the notes, but a recording card can also send a report to a group chat. There is not much difference. In the end, it is the convenience of one or two fewer steps.

One or two fewer steps, multiplied by how often you use it each day, becomes a calculation of time. Whether that is worth 2,499 yuan will come out differently for everyone. For a small team of three or four people holding meetings every day, the time saved over a year might really pay for it. For someone like me, those are steps I was never taking in the first place. I do not even have one meeting a day.

I had another thought, which may or may not be right. I think it is a good thing that Dedao is willing to make hardware for such a specific problem. And I suspect other companies will enter this space, and prices may fall. I would not state that judgment with certainty.

But I also think that “this is a real problem” and “does the market need this?” are two different questions. A real problem does not mean everyone who has it should buy one. Whether the market needs it will also take more people using it before we know.

I just laid out my own figures and worked through them. When I had finished, I put it down and walked away.

Perhaps in a few months, the way I work on my own will have changed, and I will want one. When that happens, I hope someone will work through the calculation with me like this too.

Tee Sang | Painting, writing, and growing with AI