Fieldy 3 review, the wearable that keeps no audio

Fieldy sent us a free Fieldy 3 and a year of membership, which is exactly the arrangement that produces glowing reviews. So before the unit shipped, we set terms. It gets the same protocol as every other device in our AI hardware note taker ranking, nothing about placement gets promised, and the review says what we found either way. This Fieldy 3 review is what came out of that deal. The device earned rank 4 of 8, and for one specific buyer it's the first thing we'd recommend, ahead of the three ranked above it.

The short version first. Fieldy 3 is a 17-gram wearable from Field Labs that transcribes conversations in real time through your phone and never stores the audio. It lists at $179 on Fieldy's own shop, a $19 band turns the pendant into a watch, and the battery claim is up to 7 days of typical use, the longest of anything we've ranked. The free tier includes 150 voice-detected transcription minutes a month, and the Unlimited membership removes the cap for $15.99 a month billed yearly or $19.99 billed monthly.

We wear it alongside Pocket, our daily driver, which makes the comparison unavoidable and useful. The two devices disagree about one thing, whether the recording should exist after the transcript does, and almost every difference between them falls out of that one decision. If you're weighing them directly, the Pocket vs Fieldy head-to-head goes deeper on that split. This post is about Fieldy on its own terms.

What is Fieldy 3?

Fieldy 3 is the third generation of Fieldy's wearable AI note taker. You pair it with your phone over Bluetooth, press the button once or start it from the app, and it transcribes whatever it hears in real time. The text lands in the Fieldy app as you talk, a summary follows when the conversation ends, and action items get pulled out into tasks with reminders attached. There's a privacy light on the front, haptic feedback so you know it's running, and an IP65 rating that shrugs off rain and dust.

The scale behind it is bigger than the category's newcomer energy suggests. Fieldy's site reports 47,500+ customers, 20,000+ daily users, and 50 million transcriptions completed, with a 4.6 out of 5 App Store rating across 1,700+ reviews on both platforms. Those are vendor numbers, not ours, but they match what we saw in the product. This doesn't behave like a crowdfunded prototype. It behaves like a device that's been through three hardware generations with real users filing real complaints in between.

The design bet is the thing to understand before you buy. Fieldy listens to audio but never stores it. What gets kept is an end-to-end encrypted transcript, searchable in the app, and nothing else. There's no recording to replay, which we'll come back to, because it's both the best and the worst thing about this product.

How we tested it

Same protocol as every device in the ranking. We wore it through real agency days at Market Correct, in-person conversations, phone calls, errands that turned into work calls, and the desk hours in between, with Pocket running in parallel as the control. We score capture quality, summary quality, battery against claim, app experience, whether the captures can reach tools outside the vendor's app, and whether the pricing page tells the truth. We disclose that we're transcribing at the top of every conversation, and you should too.

Because Fieldy stores no audio, judging transcription accuracy takes a different shape than it does with a recorder. With Pocket, we check the transcript against the recording. With Fieldy, the transcript is all there is, so we checked it against memory and against Pocket's parallel capture of the same rooms. Most of the time the two agreed. When they disagreed, that gap is the review.

What Fieldy does in a working day

The app is organized around three things, Memories, Chat, and Tasks. Memories are your transcribed conversations, tagged by time and location, already summarized by the time you look. Chat is an AI assistant that answers questions against your own history, useful for the "what did the contractor say about the timeline" class of question that used to mean scrolling. Tasks are the commitments Fieldy heard you make, extracted on its own with reminders attached. It's a tight, opinionated loop, and for someone who doesn't want to think about models or integrations, the opinionation is the feature.

The real-time part changes how you use it. With a recorder, the transcript arrives after the sync. With Fieldy, the text exists while the meeting is still happening, so you can glance at your phone, catch up on the five minutes you zoned out, or pull a recap before the room empties. One-click export pushes notes into Slack or Notion, and the phone-to-desktop sync means what you captured on a walk is on your computer when you sit down.

Battery is where the spec sheet stops being marketing. Up to 7 days of typical use is the claim, and in our wear the honest summary is that we charged it about weekly and stopped thinking about it, which is a different relationship than the charge-every-night one most gadgets demand. Pocket's rated 4 days is fine. Seven is invisible, and invisible is what a wearable should be.

The no-audio design, and who it's actually for

Every wearable microphone eventually meets the question "wait, are you recording this?" Fieldy is the only device we've tested whose honest answer is no. It transcribes and throws the sound away, keeping an encrypted transcript and nothing a court, a hacker, or a curious coworker could ever press play on. That's a structurally different privacy posture than a recorder with good encryption, and it changes the social contract of wearing the thing. Telling a room "it keeps notes, there's no recording" lands differently than asking people to trust your storage practices.

It's also why Fieldy can chase regulated buyers. The company states it's fully HIPAA-compliant, end to end encrypted, with data never sold or shared, and it markets openly to healthcare and legal professionals. One of the published reviews on Fieldy's site is a therapist using it to draft SOAP notes after sessions. None of that exempts you from consent law. Recording and transcription rules vary by state and country, the Reporters Committee's state-by-state guide is the reference we keep bookmarked, and our agency practice is to disclose at the top of every conversation regardless of jurisdiction.

Now the cost of the bet. No audio means no appeals process. Fieldy claims 95%+ transcription accuracy in most environments, which still leaves room for one word in twenty to come out wrong in a loud room, and when the mangled word is a name, a number, or a dosage, there's no recording to check it against. Pocket keeps the audio precisely so you can re-listen and re-run the transcription. Fieldy can't, ever, by design. Decide which failure mode scares you more before you pick a side.

Fieldy 3 pricing, what it actually costs

The hardware lists at $179 on Fieldy's shop with free shipping, a 14-day return window, and a 1-year warranty. There's been a sale banner offering up to 44.7% off at checkout the entire time we've tracked the page, under a rotating set of names, so treat $179 as the ceiling and check what the cart says today. The watch band accessory is $19 if you'd rather wear it on a wrist than a lanyard.

The membership is simpler than it used to be. When we first compared Fieldy against Pocket, the site listed a $9.99 Plus tier in the middle. That tier no longer appears. The current lineup is two options.

The voice-detection detail matters more than it looks. Fieldy only burns minutes when someone is talking, so a two-hour lunch where twenty minutes were conversation costs twenty minutes, not two hours. For a light user, 150 minutes covers a real month and the total cost of ownership is the hardware, full stop. For a heavy talker, the first year runs about $371 at list before any hardware discount, $179 plus roughly $192 of yearly-billed Unlimited. Pocket's math tilts the other way, an unlimited free transcription tier with a $19.99 a month Pro that buys the AI layer rather than minutes. The Pocket pricing breakdown has that side of the ledger.

The MCP server, the desktop app, and the model question

The integration story is better than a $179 device has any right to ship. Fieldy runs an MCP server at api.fieldy.ai, so Claude Code and other MCP clients can query your conversation history without opening the Fieldy app. In this category, only Pocket also clears that bar, and it's one of the two questions we use to split the entire field. Your captures shouldn't be hostages of the vendor's app, and here they aren't.

The free desktop app for Windows and macOS covers the laptop half of the day, transcribing online meetings live and syncing with what the wearable heard, so Zoom calls and hallway conversations end up in one searchable place. Between that, the Slack and Notion export, and the MCP server, Fieldy connects outward more honestly than most of the category.

Which makes the one closed door stranger. Fieldy doesn't say which AI model writes your summaries, and there's no model picker anywhere in the product. That's our number one ranking criterion for this category, because the summary model decides what the product is actually worth, and "trust us" isn't an answer we can score. Pocket lets you point summaries at GPT-5, Claude, or Gemini and regenerate when one misses. Fieldy hands you its pipeline's output and that's the output. It's the single biggest reason this review says rank 4 and not rank 2.

Where Fieldy 3 falls short

• No stored audio means no second chance. A mis-heard name or number in the transcript is permanent, and the 95%+ accuracy claim leaves real room for that in noisy rooms.
• The summary model isn't disclosed and there's no model choice, so the most important part of the product is a black box.
• It needs your phone in Bluetooth range with internet. It's a phone accessory, not an independent recorder.
• 150 free minutes is a trial next to Pocket's unlimited free transcription, and the gap shows for moderate talkers.
• The perpetual sale banner makes the real price ambiguous. $179 list is a number almost nobody pays, which cuts both ways.
• Speaker recognition wobbles in multi-voice rooms, a complaint that shows up in Fieldy's own published customer reviews.

None of these are dealbreakers for the buyer Fieldy is aimed at, and it says something that half of them are the same sentence, the no-audio design, read as a cost instead of a feature. The model opacity is the one we'd actually push the company on. Publish the model, or better, let users pick it, and this device starts threatening the top of the ranking instead of anchoring its middle.

Who should buy Fieldy 3?

• Privacy-first buyers, and anyone in healthcare, law, or another field where a stored recording is a liability rather than an asset.
• Heavy talkers who want unlimited transcription at $15.99 a month billed yearly, the cheapest unlimited plan in the category.
• Anyone who hates charging. The 7-day battery claim is the best here by a wide margin.
• Budget buyers who want a credible wearable and a free tier generous enough to test the habit before spending past the hardware.
• Claude and MCP users who want conversation history queryable from their existing stack.

Skip it if you replay conversations, need the exact words for disputes or interviews, or want to choose the AI writing your summaries. That buyer should get Pocket and not look back. And if your conversations mostly happen on a laptop, you don't need hardware at all, you need the software note taker ranking or a dictation stack.

The bottom line