iFLYTEK AINote 2 Review – AI-Powered E-Ink Tablet with Live Offline Audio Transcription

Last year, I reviewed the Plaud Note and Note Pro, which let you record meetings and then use AI to transcribe them and produce things like meeting notes and mind maps. As someone who sits through a lot of product briefings and meetings, and who also has ADHD, I have found that kind of tool genuinely useful. It saves me from writing notes by hand and stops me from forgetting what was said.

I later reviewed the iFLYTEK Smart Recorder. On paper, it sounded like an excellent alternative, because it offered live offline voice transcription with no subscription. In practice my experience was not as good as Plaud. The accuracy was a bit hit and miss, and it did none of the AI work such as meeting notes. It was not bad, but it was not great either.

Another device that comes up a lot among people with ADHD is the reMarkable e-ink tablet. My own experience of it is limited, but the people who own one tend to rate it highly.

So when iFLYTEK offered me the AINote 2 to review, I was interested. It is an e-ink tablet along the lines of the reMarkable, and it also offers live voice transcription and translation, plus the AI features I liked on the Plaud, including meeting notes. On paper it reads like a strong option for people with ADHD, or for anyone who needs to stay organised and attends a lot of meetings.

After a few weeks of use, it is not perfect. It has a fair number of quirks where the reMarkable is more refined. Even so, I have come to like the combination of an e-ink tablet with live voice transcription and AI summaries, and that mix is what keeps me reaching for it. It is also one of the thinnest tablets you can currently buy, and iFLYTEK leans on that hard in its marketing.

iFLYTEK AINOTE 2, AI Note Taking Tablet for Meeting, 10.65" E-Ink Tablet, Ultra-Thin 4.2mm Digital Notebook with Voice-to-Text, 18-Language Transcription, Handwritten-to-Text, Ideal for Work&Study

• Paper-Like Writing Experience (Frontlight-Free E-Ink Device）：With 8 brush styles and low-latency handwriting performance, AINOTE 2 offers a writing feel similar to pen on paper. The frontlight-free E-ink display provides comfortable viewing under normal indoor and outdoor lighting. Note: Not intended for low-light or dark-room writing without external lighting.
• AI-Powered Productivity: Leverage AI to automatically generate meeting summaries and convert handwritten notes to text in a breeze. Highlight key points with star, triangle, or circle markers, and the device instantly transforms them into actionable to-do lists and weekly reports. Manage tasks seamlessly with the included stylus.
• 18-Language Transcription Support：AINOTE 2 supports multi-language transcription designed for meetings, lectures, and interviews. This feature helps capture spoken content and convert it into text for easier review and organization. Requires an active internet connection for transcription services. Accuracy depends on audio quality, speaker accent, and environment. Designed to assist note review, not for word-for-word professional transcription.
• Ultra-Thin & Portable Design： At approximately 4.2 mm in thickness, AINOTE 2 is designed for lightweight portability. Its streamlined structure makes it easy to carry for daily work, travel, or study, while supporting extended use under typical operating conditions. The device offers up to 14 days of usage time when used for about 30 minutes per day with the remaining time in standby or powered off, and up to 113 days of standby time. Important: The device is not designed for use in extreme temperatures or harsh environmental conditions, which may affect performance or battery life.
• Effortless Ecosystem Integration: Sync AINOTE 2 with Google Calendar to keep your schedule consistent across all devices, eliminating manual updates. More app integrations are in the pipeline, ensuring you stay focused on productivity without constant tool-switching

£521.00

Buy on Amazon

The AINote 2 (left) next to the smaller AINote Air 2 (right).

Specification

Here is the full specification for the AINote 2.

Subscription Costs and Features

I loathe the trend of everything having a subscription, but I can understand the need to cover the cost of AI models. Additionally, for a productivity device, I think it becomes easier to justify the cost. For $60 a year I think the offline voice transcription makes it worth it, plus unlimited note syncing and more AI models. Due to how thin this is, and the high price, the one time replacement justifies the cost, too.

That being said, it is annoying that the offline voice transcription is walled off in the Pro subscription. If you have paid £500+ for a device that has the hardware to do offline transcription, then there is no justification to make you pay more for this. The fact that ChatGPT AI analysis is included for free makes this even more frustrating.

Design and Build

The first thing you notice is how thin and light the AINote 2 is. It measures 4.2 mm thick and weighs about 295 g, which makes it the thinnest and lightest tablet of this size that I have used. iFLYTEK markets it as a Guinness World Record holder for the thinnest tablet, and whether or not you care about the record, the practical effect is real. It is comfortable to hold in one hand for long stretches, and it slips into a bag and disappears.

That thinness comes with a trade-off. The body is mostly plastic, paired with a Mobius Carta e-ink panel that uses a flexible plastic substrate rather than glass. The upside is the low weight and a little give that should make it more resilient to a knock than a rigid glass screen. The downside is that it does not feel as reassuringly solid as a thicker, glass-backed device. Tap the lower half of the front or back and you hear a faint hollow note, as if something inside is not quite anchored. It is a small thing, and I have had no reliability problems, but it does take a little shine off otherwise lovely hardware. A strip of silver metal around the edge lifts the look, and the corners are nicely rounded.

I would go as far as to say you should budget for a case from day one. The tablet is so thin that I instinctively handled it more carefully than usual for the first week, and a folio takes that worry away.

Around the device you get a USB-C 3.0 port and a small status LED on the bottom edge, a power button with a built-in fingerprint scanner, and a dedicated button that summons iFLYTEK’s voice assistant. The stylus clips to the right edge magnetically, though the hold is weak and the pen comes off easily, so a folio with a pen loop is the safer bet. On the back are four rubber feet and a row of five pogo pins, which is how the optional keyboard folio attaches.

One omission worth flagging is the lack of a G-sensor, so the screen does not rotate automatically when you turn the device. You can switch orientation in software, but on a tablet at this price I would expect auto-rotate to be there.

e-Ink Display

The display is a 10.65-inch monochrome panel at 1920 x 2560 and 300 PPI, which is a touch larger than a sheet of A5. It is a Mobius Carta screen, and the background is strikingly white for e-ink. Text looks crisp and dark, with strong contrast, and for reading and writing it is one of the nicer monochrome panels I have looked at.

The big decision for buyers is the lack of a front light. The AINote 2 has no backlight at all, so you are reliant on ambient light. In a reasonably lit room this is not a problem, and the high contrast helps, but you cannot read in bed with the lights off. This is one area where the smaller AINote Air 2 actually has the edge, because it includes an adjustable warm and cool front light. If night reading matters to you, that difference alone may steer you towards the Air 2 or a competitor.

The other thing to understand is refresh behaviour. iFLYTEK has not fitted any of the fast-refresh modes you get from Boox or Bigme, so while the native note-taking and reading apps feel responsive, scrolling and animation in third-party Android apps can look choppy. That is normal for e-ink, but devices with fast-refresh technology handle it more gracefully.

Writing Feel and Responsiveness

I will admit upfront that I am not someone who writes much by hand, so I came to this expecting to be unimpressed. Instead, writing on the AINote 2 turned out to be one of its highlights. The screen has a light texture that gives a pleasant bit of friction, the stylus needs no charging because it uses Wacom EMR, and latency is low enough that the ink feels like it is sitting right under the nib. Responsiveness, in particular, is excellent.

The pen itself is fine rather than special. iFLYTEK quotes 4,096 pressure levels, and there are eight brush types, though in practice the difference between several of them is subtle. The bigger issue, which other reviewers have flagged and I noticed too, is that the bundled nib has a slight flex and can develop a faint squeak as it wears. Because it is a Wacom EMR device, you can swap in a third-party EMR pen, and that tidies up the writing feel considerably. It is a little disappointing that the included pen is the weak link on a device sold partly on its writing experience.

For notes you can start with a blank page or pick a template. The simple options are blank, lined or grid, but there are also weekly planners, meeting schedules, work logs and more, which I found handy for keeping each meeting in a consistent layout. There is also a neat set of pen gestures: circle something to turn it into a task or to flag it as important, and the marks tie into the task list and calendar. I will come back to the limits of that in the schedule section, because it does not handle multiple items as cleanly as I would like.

Performance and Hardware

Inside is a Rockchip RK3576 octa-core chip, with four Cortex-A72 and four Cortex-A53 cores running up to 2.2 GHz, backed by 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage. There is no microSD slot, so you are stuck with the onboard 64 GB.

In benchmark terms this is a mid-to-lower tier e-ink processor. Geekbench 6 figures reported for the device land at roughly 321 single-core and 893 multi-core, which tells you it is built for note-taking and reading rather than heavy multitasking. In day-to-day use the native apps are responsive enough, and I rarely felt held back when writing or reading. The slow moments tend to show up in specific places: toggling Wi-Fi, loading the email client, and waiting for the AI to generate text. Those felt more like software inefficiency than a lack of raw power, and they are the sort of thing a firmware update could improve.

One hardware limitation to be aware of is that there are no built-in speakers. The four-microphone array is there for recording and voice commands, and it does a good job of picking up a room, but if you want to play back a recording you will need Bluetooth headphones or a speaker. For a device pitched at meetings and audio notes, the absence of even a basic speaker is an odd gap.

AI Features

The AI tools are what separate the AINote 2 from a plain e-ink notebook. They cover live transcription, meeting summaries, handwriting recognition (OCR), content templates and mind maps. iFLYTEK talks up the underlying model in fairly grand terms, and you should treat that marketing language with the usual pinch of salt. What matters is how the features behave, and that is a mixed picture. The transcription is the strongest part, while the chat-style AI and text generation are slower and less consistent.

It is also worth understanding that most of the cleverer AI work needs an internet connection, because the language models run on iFLYTEK’s servers rather than on the tablet. That is unavoidable for large-model features on any device, but it does mean two things. First, the AI features will not work offline. Second, your data is being sent to a server for processing, which some people will be uneasy about for sensitive meetings. The live transcription can fall back to downloadable offline language packs, which is the part I care about most, and I will cover that shortly.

AI OCR

OCR, the conversion of handwriting into typed text, is meant to underpin a lot of the device. The spec sheet lists a long roster of supported languages, well over a hundred once you include the secondary list. In practice, accuracy is the weak spot. With tidy writing it does a reasonable job, but it is inconsistent, and because several other features lean on it, such as turning a circled note into a task, that inconsistency spreads. My handwriting is not the neatest, so your mileage may vary, but I would not rely on it for anything where errors would be costly without checking the output.

Where it worked best for me was the task list. You handwrite a task, the device recognises the text, and you accept it. That flow is genuinely useful. It is more hit and miss elsewhere, and as I note in the schedule section, the calendar does not get the same handwriting recognition that tasks do.

AI Offline Live Transcription

This is the feature that justifies the AINote 2 for me, and the reason I would pick it over a reMarkable. You start a recording, tap the transcription icon, and the device transcribes speech live on screen. When you stop, you can drop the transcript straight into a note. I tested it during a pre-brief for an Honor device, and the live transcription was accurate, which is more than I could say for the older iFLYTEK Smart Recorder I reviewed previously.

There is a second touch I like a lot. With click to speak enabled, you can jot a note while a meeting is being recorded, and afterwards, tapping that note jumps you to the exact point in the audio where you wrote it. It is a simple idea that works well for going back to the moment a decision was made.

My main criticism is that it does not identify or label individual speakers. iFLYTEK makes a lot of the four-microphone array, and some coverage suggests it can separate speakers, but in my use the transcript came through as a single block of text without attributing who said what. The Plaud Note does handle speaker separation, so if that matters to you, the AINote 2 falls short there. The flip side is that the Plaud does not do live, on-screen transcription, so the AINote 2 wins on immediacy. For me, watching the words appear in real time, and being able to fix a name or detail on the spot, is the more useful capability.

The live transcription is also where the offline language packs come in. Being able to download English and a handful of other languages for on-device transcription means the feature I value most does not depend entirely on a server, which is reassuring. I just hope iFLYTEK does not hide those packs behind a fee later, given the VIP label they currently carry.

AI Content Templates

Under the AI menu there is a set of content tools aimed at turning raw notes into something structured. The one most people will use is meeting minutes: point it at a transcribed meeting and it produces a tidy summary. For getting the gist of a long meeting quickly, it is a real time-saver. Plaud still does this better, mainly because it offers a choice of summary styles, whereas the AINote 2 is more one-size-fits-all.

There are also content-generation templates for drafting. As a test, I treated it as if I were writing a review of this very device. I gave it a title and some key points, told it how many headings I wanted, and it generated an outline with a title and subheadings. I did not use its structure word for word, but it did prompt me to rethink and tweak my own outline, so as a starting point it has its uses. The device can also build mind maps from your notes, which is a quick way to lay out how ideas connect without jumping into another app.

Email

Email is where the experience dips. On the AINote 2 I added my Gmail account first time without trouble, which was an improvement over the smaller Air 2, where I fought with it. There it took a while to accept my password and then hung on the configuration screen before failing.

Getting it set up is one thing, using it is another. On both tablets the email client is slow. There is a noticeable delay every time messages load, which makes working through a full inbox a chore on e-ink. I also expected the email app to tie into the rest of the device, for example letting me create a task from an email, and it does not. Given how neatly notes, tasks and the calendar work together elsewhere, email feeling bolted on is a missed opportunity. I would treat email here as an occasional convenience rather than something to rely on.

Schedule and Tasks

The scheduling side suits me. I try to keep an up-to-date calendar and a lot of task lists, partly because of my ADHD, and having that on the same device as my notes and recordings is helpful. The way notebooks tie into the calendar and task list is one of the things the AINote 2 does well.

Tasks are the highlight. You can handwrite a task, the device recognises the text, and you confirm it. You can also flag something inside a note by circling it and push it across to the task list. The limitation I ran into is that you cannot select several handwritten tasks at once and have each recognised separately. If you try, it bundles them into a single task, so you end up entering them one at a time.

The calendar can sync with Google Calendar, which is the integration I wanted. The frustration is that adding an entry to the calendar does not use the same handwriting recognition that tasks do, so you are typing rather than writing. It is a small inconsistency, but on a device built around the pen, it stands out.

Reading

As an e-reader the AINote 2 is solid. It opens a wide range of formats, including PDF, EPUB, MOBI, AZW3 and the Office types, and the white, high-contrast screen is easy on the eyes. The 10.65-inch panel is a sensible size for documents and most books, though for full A4 PDFs a 13-inch device is more comfortable.

There are a couple of things to weigh. The lack of a front light, as covered earlier, limits low-light reading. There is also no local dictionary, so word look-up is handled through the AI, which means it needs an internet connection, and the translation option was awkward in testing. Page turns in heavier PDFs can feel slow because there is no fast-refresh mode. On the plus side, you can install the Kindle app, so your existing Kindle library is available, and you can pull files in from OneDrive rather than filling the 64 GB of internal storage.

The app drawer, with Google Play, WPS Office, Kindle and Keep Notes installed.

Google Play and Apps

A real advantage the AINote 2 has over the Air 2, and over some rivals, is the built-in Google Play Store. That means you are not limited to whatever the manufacturer bundles. I installed Google Play services, Google Keep and the Kindle app without any fuss, and WPS Office comes preloaded for documents. The smaller AINote Air 2 does not include the Play Store, so on that device you are sideloading through APKPure instead.

Two caveats apply. E-ink is not the ideal home for every Android app, and without a fast-refresh mode some apps scroll and animate poorly, so set your expectations accordingly. The built-in cloud drive also supports OneDrive, but I had trouble connecting it at first before it settled down. Once linked, it is a useful way to move files on and off the device.

Battery Life

The AINote 2 has a 4,000 mAh battery, which is a reasonable size for a 10-inch e-ink tablet, and it charges over USB-C at 5 V / 2 A in under three hours. How long it lasts depends heavily on what you do with it. Measured drain figures put note-taking at roughly 8% per hour, reading at about 1% per hour, with Wi-Fi adding around 1% per hour on top. iFLYTEK and some reviewers quote much longer figures, in the region of a couple of weeks, but that assumes very light use.

In reality, the note-taking app is fairly power-hungry, so if you write a lot, record meetings and lean on the AI and Wi-Fi, expect to charge it every few days rather than once a fortnight. If you mostly read, it will go a lot longer. It is not a standout in this area, and the heavy lifting done by the note-taking app is the main reason. For my pattern of use, which is a mix of meetings, notes and a bit of reading, planning to charge it a couple of times a week is about right.

Connectivity and Wi-Fi

Connectivity is the area that frustrated me most, and it is worth a section of its own. The AINote 2 is advertised with Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4. Bluetooth was fine, and pairing headphones was straightforward. Wi-Fi was a different story on both this tablet and the Air 2. As far as I can tell, the Wi-Fi only operates on 2.4 GHz, and I could not get either device to connect to networks that broadcast 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz together. Both of the networks I tried run on UniFi kit, so that may be part of the problem, but it is not the behaviour I would expect from a device sold as Wi-Fi 6.

To test it further, I tried tethering to my phone’s hotspot. The 2.4 GHz band connected without issue, but the 5 GHz band did not even appear in the network list. If you run a single combined network name across both bands, as a lot of people do, this is worth checking before you buy, because a chunk of the device’s value, the AI and transcription syncing, depends on a stable connection. I also noticed the occasional pause when turning Wi-Fi on and off, which lines up with what other reviewers have reported.

Price, Accessories and Alternative Options

Preview	Product	Price
	iFLYTEK AINOTE 2, AI Note Taking Tablet for Meeting, 10.65" E-Ink Tablet, Ultra-Thin 4.2mm Digital...	£521.00	Buy on Amazon
	iFLYTEK AINOTE Air 2 Digital Notebook, 8.2-Inch E Ink Tablet with Stylus	£429.00	Buy on Amazon

The AINote 2 is not cheap. It costs £650, which does at least include a refill set of five stylus tips. The optional Type Folio keyboard is a further £117.37. On the keyboard, I would temper expectations. Other reviewers have found it works well enough as a keyboard but poorly as a folio, with the heavy keyboard panel pressing against the screen when closed, so I would not buy it expecting a do-everything case. A standard folio is thin and light, in keeping with the tablet, and adds only modest weight, with the tablet plus folio coming in at around 449 g.

If the live transcription and AI are not your priority, the smaller AINote Air 2 covers a lot of the same ground for less. It costs £469 on its own, or:

1. £509 with a protective case
2. £516 with a protective case and extra stylus tips

The Air 2 is smaller, drops a couple of the LLM-based AI features, and does not include the Google Play Store, you sideload via APKPure instead. It does add a front light, which the AINote 2 lacks.

The obvious cross-shop is reMarkable, which is more refined as a writing and reading device but does not do live transcription. The line-up is:

1. reMarkable Paper Pure at £359
2. reMarkable Paper Pro Move at £399, which has a colour display
3. reMarkable Paper Pro at £559

There are also the Boox and Supernote devices, which tend to offer more mature firmware and, in Boox’s case, faster third-party app performance, if a polished general-purpose e-ink tablet matters more to you than transcription.

Put plainly, you are paying a premium for the AINote 2, and the thing that premium buys you over a reMarkable or a Boox is the live offline transcription with AI summaries. If you do not need that, the value case is harder to make.

Overall

Overall, I have grown to like the AINote 2. The main reason is the live transcription. For me, that feature is the main selling point, and it is the one thing that would make me choose this over a reMarkable option.

It is not a clean win. The hardware is lovely to hold, but it is so thin it definitely needs a protective case if I leave the house. There is no front light. The Wi-Fi would only run at 2.4 GHz for me. The OCR is inconsistent. Email is slow, and the price is high. iFLYTEK is clearly still maturing the firmware, and a lot of my complaints are software issues that could be fixed in an update, so the device may well improve over time.

The combination of an e-ink tablet you can write on, that records a meeting and transcribes it live, then summarises it with AI, is fantastic. As someone who sits through a lot of briefings and relies on notes and reminders to stay on top of things, that mix has earned the AINote 2 a place in my bag, quirks and all. If you want the most polished e-ink writing and reading experience, buy a reMarkable or a Boox. If what you want is live transcription and AI summaries on an e-ink device, the AINote 2 is well worth considering.

James Smythe( Owner / Editor )

I am James, a UK-based tech enthusiast and the Editor and Owner of Mighty Gadget, which I’ve proudly run since 2007. Passionate about all things technology, my expertise spans from computers and networking to mobile, wearables, and smart home devices.

As a fitness fanatic who loves running and cycling, I also have a keen interest in fitness-related technology, and I take every opportunity to cover this niche on my blog. My diverse interests allow me to bring a unique perspective to tech blogging, merging lifestyle, fitness, and the latest tech trends.

In my academic pursuits, I earned a BSc in Information Systems Design from UCLAN, before advancing my learning with a Master’s Degree in Computing.

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