Bringing real-world conversations into the product context layer

BuildBetter helps product teams at companies like Brex, PostHog, and Gorgias turn customer interactions into structured signals that give product, success, and engineering a shared understanding of what customers need.

But one source of context was always missing: the conversations happening away from a screen.

With Plaud Embedded, BuildBetter now brings those conversations directly into their product.

BuildBetter captures conversations across an organization in places like calls, support tickets, emails, and Slack. But their customers also do in-person research, talk to teammates, meet for lunch, and think out loud on walks. Many of these moments contain important context for documentation, knowledge sharing, brainstorming, and product development. Users asked BuildBetter: was there a way to capture those interactions too?

The challenge was that in-person conversations are the easiest to lose. Unlike a support ticket or a recorded call, there is no way to recover a conversation that was never captured in the first place. “You can’t go back,” says Spencer Shulem, BuildBetter’s co-founder and CEO. “Once that moment is gone, so is the follow-up and the context for the teammate who wasn’t there.”

For BuildBetter, the missing piece was the ability to reliably capture real-world conversations in a way that fit into how people worked, without adding friction.

Spencer’s team started where most teams start: software. They built local recorders on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android using the phone itself. But phones and laptops weren’t designed for this. “You’re not going to do a walk-and-talk with a teammate while carrying your laptop,” Spencer says, “and you’re not going to hold your phone up between two people and say, ‘Okay, can you talk now?’”

The lesson was that form factor decides adoption.

A capture tool only works if it becomes effortless to use. If it adds friction, people will move on and the conversation will be lost.

Why not build the hardware

Spencer’s team explored creating their own hardware, but quickly realized that devices were not where they wanted to invest their time. What they kept describing to each other was, in effect, a device that already existed.

“We didn’t want to get into the hardware business,” Spencer says. “We wanted a Plaud device that let us integrate.”

Spencer had been a Plaud customer for years, almost from the beginning. He knew the hardware was reliable and the form factor was right. “It just always worked,” he says. “You turned it on, it recorded; you turned it off, it stopped. It wasn’t always listening, so it didn’t have any privacy or security issues.”

But BuildBetter wasn’t looking for another standalone recording tool. They needed a way to make that capture experience part of their own product.

With Plaud Embedded, recordings could flow directly into BuildBetter through the SDK, without asking customers to export, upload, and label everything by hand.

Using Plaud Embedded, BuildBetter now brings in-person conversations into the same context layer that already holds a company’s calls, tickets, and messages.

Those in-person conversations become structured input for product decisions. A field sales rep’s customer conversation, a customer success check-in, an impromptu R&D chat in the hallway, all of it flows into the same system product teams already use to decide what to build.

That captured context also becomes the fuel for everything downstream. A conversation stops being a thing that happened and becomes something a company can act on.

For Spencer, the opportunity goes beyond meetings. The next generation of AI applications will need context from everywhere people think, create, and make decisions, not just the conversations that happen in front of a screen.

“If they’re on a walk with their partner and they want to take some notes down, or they want to write a blog post and just walk and talk, we want to be able to take that context and get that to an agent that can put it to work immediately inside BuildBetter.”