Flowtica ships AI note-taking pen to turn transcripts into next steps

Flowtica's Kickstarter project for an AI note-taking pen met its fundraising goal within 10 minutes. Now Flowtica Scribe has shipped more than 10,000 pens and is available on Flowtica's website and Amazon. To build a world-class AI note-taking app, the speech-to-text infrastructure is critical. Flowtica chose Deepgram as its primary provider to support growing volumes of audio transcription.

• <5% of in-app reported issues relate to transcription quality
• 60-minute recording transcribed in under 30 seconds on average
• >10,000 Scribe pens shipped via Kickstarter, web, and Amazon
• 10x higher AI subscription attach rate than typical SaaS subscriptions
• Deepgram chosen from 10 providers over three test rounds

Flowtica's inaugural product, Flowtica Scribe, elevates note-taking by combining a user's written notes and feedback about what's important in a meeting with the context provided by a full meeting recording. The result is notes and action items that truly feel like having a personal assistant. Since launching its Kickstarter project in July 2025 and raising more than $336,000, Flowtica has shipped more than 10,000 pens and now fulfills orders from its website as well as Amazon.

Flowtica Scribe's ideal customers are already taking notes by hand and are looking for ways to enhance the quality of their notes as well as keep track of the most important next steps from their meetings. One user had kept a bullet journal for years and described his old method. He took notes with a pen and notebook, used a separate recorder to capture audio, and uploaded it to an AI assistant for a summary that he could use as a basis for writing the most important points back into his notebook.

Building a pen that can also reliably record and transcribe audio in real-world conditions is challenging. A typical meeting might include several speakers in an open room where no one has a microphone. Features like diarization or identifying unique speakers, transcribing in multiple languages, and providing the audio alongside the transcript are all essential to Flowtica Scribe's pen and companion app.

Users often want to replay their recordings, so Flowtica wrote its own noise reduction to make them easy to listen to, and the results surprised the team.

Because transcription quality is essential to every other downstream workflow for Flowtica Scribe, the team put vendor candidates through rigorous testing. The team ran the same long recordings through every candidate, and for each language a native speaker read the transcript against the recording.

Deepgram is now Flowtica's primary Speech-to-Text provider, running batch transcription behind the pen and the mobile app. Four things carried it in production:

• Headroom on rough audio. Transcription held up on rawer input, so Flowtica could tune its own noise reduction for the person playing a recording back and keep the transcript usable.
• Rates that leave margin. At the volume a growing install base generates, the per-hour cost is what keeps a subscription profitable as usage climbs.
• Diarization on every meeting. Speaker separation is a hard requirement for a product built around rooms full of people, and Flowtica layered its own labeling on top. Users can name a speaker once, and the label carries forward from a few samples.
• Diverse language coverage. Flowtica can support a broad range of European languages with one provider.

Since coming online, Flowtica has expanded to fulfilling orders on its own site and Amazon. Beyond the one-time purchase of the pen, users can subscribe to an AI plan in the app. This is an important source of ongoing revenue, and one that is directly influenced by the quality of the audio transcription.

It has held up on both counts. Transcription errors account for less than 5% of the issues users report through in-app feedback, and transcription on a 60-minute recording typically comes back from Deepgram in under 30 seconds. In particular, the turnaround time on transcription is where Deepgram pulls ahead of the other providers Flowtica has worked with.

Flowtica's AI subscription attach rate is more than 10 times what is typical for software products. Zac sees the physical product as an important part of that relationship.

As transcription use has grown steadily, Flowtica has upgraded to Deepgram's enterprise plan. The team also uses a combination of usage data and customer feedback in the app to improve quality and prioritize new features.

Today, the user who loves the bullet journal method still writes by hand in meetings. The series of steps to record, upload, and summarize is consolidated down to one tool and a couple of buttons. "He thought it was magic," Zac said.

With the success of its first product, the team is focused on delivering more for users. A Mac app is in beta for online meetings, and additional integrations like Google Calendar are underway.