It may be easier to start with noise cancellation and then move on to the more interesting and advanced features these headphones offer. Frankly, the quality of the ANC is mixed. Viaim claims its smart ANC feature offers up to 48dB of noise reduction, which is really just a marketing number. In practice, these headphones are far from reaching the level of competitors like the AirPods Pro 3 or the Sony WF-1000XM6 headphones. This is not necessarily surprising. It would be surprising for a relatively unknown company to match those that have been working on their ANC technology for many years now, but it’s still something you’ll want to keep in mind if you’re considering purchasing these headphones.
This is also true for the transparency mode, which is frankly mediocre. It adds noticeable hiss to your audio and is not very effective at producing higher frequency noises or achieving a completely natural audio response. Some headphones are very good in transparency mode these days, to the point where you almost forget you’re wearing them. This is far from the case for these headphones.
The ANC, of course, may not be the reason you’re buying these headphones in the first place. Instead, you would buy them for the AI recording and transcription features. RecDot headphones can be used to record and transcribe any call you make, whether it’s via Zoom, WhatsApp, your standard cellular connection, or anything else. Transcription is actually quite fast and quite accurate – although I wasn’t necessarily surprised to see this, given that I’ve found AI transcription tools generally excellent across the board.
Real-time transcription supports 78 languages, and the app leverages third-party LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude to automatically generate meeting minutes and to-do lists from what it captures. In my testing, transcription is fast and generally accurate, and having a searchable archive of every meeting truly changes the way you work. That said, it’s not perfect. Speaker identification can be difficult in multi-speaker scenarios, especially with accents, so you’ll need to double-check transcriptions before treating them as gospel.
I also found using it to be rather confusing. You can use the transcription feature with the earbuds in or out of the case, but to use the record button on the case itself, at least one earbud must be in that case. I had to dig through the supporting documents to find out. Fortunately, there is still a way to use the transcription features without a case by holding down the stem to activate record mode. This means you can still use the transcription features with the headphones in your ears, which is normal.
There is, of course, a subscription that you will need to think about signing up for – although fortunately most will be able to get by just fine on the free plan. You’ll get 600 minutes of free cloud transcription each month, which should last around 10 hours and be more than enough for most use cases. However, power users can pay $10 per month for 1,800 minutes at the Pro level, or $20 per month for unlimited minutes at the Ultra level. You’ll have to determine for yourself whether it’s worth paying an ongoing fee.
Unfortunately, some more advanced features are also built into the subscription, like multilingual support. In other words, if you plan to use the headphones for tasks like real-time translation, you may need to subscribe to the Pro or Ultra plan.
As you might expect, many features require use of the Viaim companion app, which is nice but not amazing. The Viaim app allows you to access your transcriptions, manage your subscription, and manage the settings of the headphones themselves. It’s relatively easy to navigate and most will get used to the way the app is designed fairly quickly. Finally, connectivity comes through Bluetooth 5.2 with multipoint support, so you can stay connected to a laptop and a phone simultaneously, which is useful for the work-focused use case here.
