The Insta360 Wave is a Beamforming Voice Recorder With AI Transcription
Insta360 has announced the Wave, a beamforming “professional-grade” voice recorder designed for large rooms and groups of people. In short, it’s a very high-end speakerphone with the ability to either connect with teleconferencing services or be used standalone with onboard storage.
The Wave sports an eight-microphone array equipped with AI-powered noise cancellation, dereverberation, and adaptive beamforming. The noise cancellation promises to eliminate over 300 types of background sound, from keyboard clicks to street noise. The dereverberation refers to its ability to remove hollow or distant tones, like those that would occur from the far side of a conference table, and improve them to sound as good as if they were coming from right next to the microphone. Insta360 says that these AI tools aside, the mic array captures voices “in Hi-Fi 48kHz detail from up to 16 feet away.”
The adaptive beamforming refers to the Wave’s ability to be adjusted to pick up where voices are coming from, and Insta360 equipped the microphone with five pickup patterns for different scenarios:
- Omni: 360-degree pickup for group discussions.
- Cardioid: Focused front capture for online meetings and podcasts.
- Supercardioid: Suppresses ambient noise even further, perfect for busy offices.
- Figure-8: Captures front and back, ideal for two-person interviews.
- Stereo: Wide, natural audio for creative recordings like ASMR or music.
Using a touchscreen interface, users can set the Wave to work in tandem with conferencing tools like Zoom or Microsoft Teams or rely on it as a standalone recorder thanks to 32GB of built-in storage, which is enough for about 1,000 hours of audio. It also has an AI-assisted five-minute pre-recording feature that allows users to hit record after something has been said and still capture it.
The speakerphone is also designed to work in tandem with the Link 2 AI webcam, which can be mounted on top of the Wave to create an all-in-one video conferencing tool.
The Wave has the built-in ability to tap into Insta360’s AI-powered transcription, too. This does require a separate subscription, and the base plan includes 300 minutes of transcription per month. When enabled, the Wave will be able to transcribe conversations (in 99 languages), identify speakers and voiceprint them for labeling, provide summaries of conversations, and let users search conversations quickly to find quotes or segments they’re looking for just through keywords.
“With Insta360 Wave, we’ve combined professional audio capture with an AI system that makes every conversation searchable, shareable, and smarter,” Max Richter, VP of Marketing and Co-Founder at Insta360, says. “This is the kind of solution that gives workplaces and solo creators far more than other speakerphones today.”
The Insta360 Wave is available starting today in black or white for $300. The basic subscription to the InSight transcription service is free for a limited time (Insta360 did not say how much it would eventually cost) while the Pro Plan, which increases the limit of transcription to 1,200 minutes per month, costs $100 annually or $18 per month. Additionally, transcription credits will be offered on demand.
Image credits: Insta360
