Read AI is an AI meeting assistant made by Read AI, Inc., a Seattle company founded in 2021 by David Shim, Rob Williams and Elliott Waldron. It joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet calls as a visible participant, records them and sends a meeting report with a summary, action items, a speaker-labeled transcript and engagement metrics. The Free plan covers 5 meeting reports a month and meetings up to 1 hour, and Pro costs $15 per user per month billed annually or $19.75 per user per month billed monthly [1]. Our verdict: a legitimate, capable product with a generous free tier, held back by one aggressive default. It joins everything.
What Read AI is, and who owns it
Read AI lives at read.ai. Its core is the meeting assistant, which shows up in calls as read.ai meeting notes by default. Around it sit bot-free capture through desktop apps for Windows and macOS, iPhone and Android apps for in-person conversations, file uploads and Google Meet native recording. Ask Read searches and chats across your meetings, email and messaging with citations. Ada, an assistant you reach at ada@read.ai, handles scheduling and questions by email only. Ada never joins meetings.
Who owns Read AI? A venture-funded company, Read AI, Inc. It is based at 999 Third Ave in Seattle. CEO David Shim previously ran Foursquare and founded Placed; Rob Williams is CTO and Elliott Waldron leads data science. Read AI's own posts list a $10 million seed round in September 2021 from Madrona, a $21 million Series A in April 2024 led by Goodwater Capital, and a $50 million Series B in October 2024 led by Smash Capital. Read AI says its total funding reached $81 million.
Is Read AI legit? The paperwork says yes. Its help center describes a SOC 2 Type 2 report, participation in the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, and AES-256 encryption at rest with TLS 1.2 or later in transit. Read AI says it had more than 5 million monthly active users and was used at 90% of the Fortune 500 as of May 2026. Those are vendor claims. Read AI also says meeting content trains no models unless a user opts in to its Customer Experience Program, which is off by default and excludes Workspaces.
How Read AI gets into your meetings
You connect a Google Calendar, an Outlook calendar in Microsoft 365 or a Zoom calendar, and the assistant arrives about 3 to 5 minutes before each call. By default it joins every event on the connected calendar [2], and onboarding marks that option as recommended. The recap goes to everyone with access by default. When it joins, the assistant posts a chat notice naming who invited it. Anyone in the call can type Read stop to end recording and keep a partial report, or Opt out to make it leave and delete everything.
That default explains most of what people post on Reddit and review sites. A new user connects a calendar and Read appears in every meeting, the 7-day trial included. Attendees without an account receive the summary with an invitation to sign up, and Read AI's own help says this is how accounts are often created. Limiting auto-join to meetings you host, to internal-only meetings, or switching it off takes one settings page. Other attendees can still bring their own Read. Our guide to removing Read AI covers every route.
Platform rules differ. Since November 2026, Read joins a Zoom meeting only when the user has connected a Zoom account and is in the meeting signed in to it, so it can no longer be sent alone. On Teams it enters as an anonymous guest, so guest access must be allowed, and it cannot join calls started from Teams Chat. On Google Meet you choose the bot or Meet native recording, which needs a consent pop-up approved within 10 minutes of the start. Webex, GoTo Meeting and RingCentral are out of the bot's reach.
The desktop app covers those platforms, with trade-offs. Desktop recordings are audio only, with no video, coaching or speaker attribution. The mobile apps record in-person conversations but not phone calls, FaceTime or virtual meetings on the phone. In both modes Read is invisible to everyone else, and chat commands do not apply. The user must tell participants and collect consent, because the product cannot enforce it. The desktop app does offer a disclosure message with an opt-out link, but it works only if the user shares it.
When you record with the Read AI desktop or mobile app, other people see no notice and chat commands do not work, so you must tell them and get their consent.
What Read AI costs
Read AI charges per user (license) per month. Every person in a Workspace needs a license, all licenses in a Workspace sit on the same plan and billing cycle, and Free users cannot join a Workspace at all. Only one person in a meeting needs an account to create and share a report, so guests do not need licenses.
Prices shown are what Read AI lists for visitors in the United States, in US dollars. Your price can differ by country, currency and local taxes such as VAT.
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Key limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0, no card | $0, no card | 5 meeting reports a month (shared ones count), 1-hour meetings, no upload minutes |
| Pro | $15 per user per month, billed annually | $19.75 per user per month, billed monthly | Unlimited reports, 4-hour meetings, 100 upload minutes a month |
| Enterprise | $22.50 per user per month, billed annually | Enterprise $29.75 per user per month, billed monthly | Adds audio and video playback, 200 upload minutes a month |
| Enterprise+ (requires 5+ licenses) | Enterprise+ $29.75 per user per month, billed annually | $39.75 per user per month, billed monthly | Adds SSO, SCIM, HIPAA (annual billing only), 8-hour meetings, 300 upload minutes a month |
The toggle on the pricing page labels annual billing as 25% off. By our arithmetic, one Pro user pays $180 a year billed annually or $237 a year billed monthly, a $57 gap, and the smallest Enterprise+ team of five pays $1,785 a year billed annually. Monthly Pro billing stays cheaper than an annual Pro charge only if you stop within nine months; from the tenth month, annual wins. Extra upload minutes cost $20 per 500 minutes and never expire. Annual orders of 100, 500 or 1,000 licenses earn 10%, 15% or 20% off through sales.
Every new account starts with a 7-day trial of Enterprise, with no card, once per account, and then moves to Free automatically [3]. Free never expires. Its 5-report cap counts reports others share with you, and from the sixth report Read marks meetings as out of quota. One rule matters before paying: Read AI does not offer refunds, and cancelling keeps access until the end of the billing period [4]. Our Read AI pricing breakdown works through team sizes.
Where Read AI is strong
The meeting report is the center, and it is thorough. It carries a summary, chapters, action items, key questions and a transcript by speaker, usually ready 5 to 15 minutes after the call. Meeting Coach, on every plan, privately scores each attendee on clarity, inclusion, pace and filler words. Read AI's help center lists 35 languages for meeting reports, detected automatically, though meetings that mix several languages are not fully supported.
The Free plan reaches further than its cap suggests. Ask Read questions are unlimited, Slack and Microsoft Teams summaries work, and the REST API and MCP server (both open beta) are open on Free. Ada costs nothing on any plan. A developer can pull meetings into Claude or ChatGPT through the MCP server without paying, inside the 5-report limit and the API's 100 requests per minute per user.
Pro is where Read AI turns into a work tool. It unlocks Notion, Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Confluence[p1], Zapier and webhooks, plus Ask Read over Google Drive, OneDrive and CRM data. Stock templates such as BANT, MEDDPICC and SPICED can push structured notes to HubSpot or Salesforce automatically. Custom vocabulary of up to 100 terms helps with product names and jargon.
During onboarding pick only events you host or internal-only meetings, and set recaps to Only me. Otherwise Read joins every event on your calendar and shares the recap with everyone with access.
Where it falls short
The auto-join default is the biggest weakness, and it shapes the product's reputation. On Trustpilot the recurring complaints are an assistant joining meetings nobody remembers inviting, spam-like sign-up emails to participants, trouble deleting accounts, login problems, slow support and billing. Treat that as a map of failure points, not a trend. Each one traces back to the documented defaults above, so a careful setup avoids most of them.
The rating sources split along the same line. App store reviewers, mostly people who chose the tool and set it up themselves, rate it highly. G2 is more measured. Trustpilot collects many participants who met Read without choosing it, which is why it sits far lower than the others. Read the gap as a warning about defaults rather than about the reports themselves.
Several limits are easy to miss. Playback of audio and video starts on Enterprise, so Pro gets transcripts and reports only. Calendars stop at Google, Zoom and Outlook in Microsoft 365, with no iCloud and no Exchange outside Microsoft 365. Uploaded files get no automatic speaker identification and no coaching. On Free, recordings are deleted 180 days after the meeting and report text is kept no longer than 2 years. Read AI does not publish an accuracy rate for its transcription.
Governance sits high. SSO, SCIM, domain capture, retention policies and EU or Canada hosting all need Enterprise+, which requires 5+ licenses, and HIPAA with a BAA needs Enterprise+ billed annually. Two-factor authentication cannot be enforced for password logins, only through SSO. The Terms also send disputes to binding individual arbitration under Washington law. Legal teams should read that.
The 7-day trial at sign-up is Enterprise, so check playback and premium integrations then. Trials include no upload minutes.
Who Read AI fits, and our score
Read AI fits teams that live in Teams and Google Meet and want reports pushed into Slack, Notion or a CRM without anyone taking notes. Sales teams on HubSpot or Salesforce get the most from Pro templates. Individuals with a handful of meetings a month can stay on Free, and developers get the API and MCP server at no cost. It suits people who will set auto-join deliberately on day one.
Skip it if you need to replay calls cheaply or want no bot at all. Otter plays back recorded audio on every plan, while Read AI holds playback for Enterprise; Granola uses no meeting bot but stores no audio, so it has no playback. On monthly billing, Read AI Enterprise at $29.75 per user per month and Otter Business at $30 per user per month list sit almost level. Otter meters minutes, while Read AI meters reports. Our Read AI vs Otter.ai comparison goes plan by plan.
We score each axis on its own evidence from Read AI's pricing page, help center, Terms and the rating sources above. Read AI's Toolkit Score is 3.9/5. In our reading, the product earns its points on report depth and on how much Free includes, and gives them back on sharing defaults and on how far up the plan ladder security controls sit.
Read AI covers the meeting-notes job through several capture modes: a meeting assistant that joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet as a visible participant (default name read.ai meeting notes) from a connected calendar or by a manual add from the web app, Zoom App, Teams app or Chromium browser extension; Google Meet native recording through the Meet Media API with no bot (Read AI recommends it) and a free Meet add-on; a free Windows and macOS desktop app that records computer audio on any platform, including Webex, GoTo Meeting, RingCentral, Slack huddles and Teams calls started from Chat, which the assistant cannot join; iPhone and Android apps for in-person meetings; and MP4 or M4A uploads up to 5 GB. Each meeting report carries a summary, chapters, action items, key questions and a transcript by speaker with participant metrics (talk time, engagement, sentiment), templates (SPICED, BANT, MEDDPICC and custom), folders, transcript editing, custom vocabulary of 100 terms on paid plans, a live meeting dashboard and Meeting Coach on every plan; paid plans have unlimited reports and meetings up to 4 hours (8 hours on Enterprise+). Held back by the Free plan's 5 meeting reports a month (reports shared with you count) and 1-hour meetings; audio and video playback, highlight reels and .mp4 downloads only from Enterprise; downloads documented only as .txt and .mp4; desktop recordings that are audio only with no video, coaching or speaker attribution, and uploads with no automatic speaker identification or coaching; a mobile app that cannot record phone calls, FaceTime or virtual meetings; no language setting and meetings mixing languages not fully supported; and, since the November 2026 Zoom change, a Zoom rule that lets the assistant join only when the user has connected a Zoom account and is in the meeting, while Teams needs anonymous join enabled and cannot pass Teams' human verification.
Lifted by an AI layer that reaches past the meeting: Ask Read (formerly Search Copilot) is RAG search and chat with citations over meetings, email (Gmail, Outlook), calendars and chat (Slack, Teams), unlimited on every plan including Free, available inside Slack and Teams at no cost, with premium sources (Google Drive, OneDrive, Confluence, Notion, HubSpot, Salesforce, Jira) on paid plans, and four Ask Read Actions (CRM update, which needs a Pro CRM integration; email sent only after the user confirms; calendar; scheduled updates); Ada, an email-based executive assistant at ada@read.ai, free for all users, for scheduling and questions about meetings and work; agents (Post-Meeting Recap on every plan, Monday Briefing, Topics and Sales Funnel on paid plans or the trial, End of Week, Recommendations, Scheduling); Readouts that summarize Gmail, Outlook, Slack and Teams by topic (14 days on Free, unlimited on paid plans); Meeting Coach (clarity, inclusion, impact, pace, filler words) and engagement and sentiment scoring on every plan; For You, Prepare pre-reads and HubSpot / Salesforce deal-stage recommendations. Held back by the OpenAI and Anthropic models in Ask Read (paid plans only) searching only the web, not meetings or connected sources; Monday Briefing and the Daily Read podcast (beta) in English only; bias and charisma scores unavailable in the EU and UK, for uploads and for desktop recordings, and no video or facial analysis in the EU and UK; no published accuracy figure for its transcription (the Terms say AI outputs are not warranted as accurate); Ada works by email only and does not join meetings or run in HIPAA workspaces; and agentic features act without per-action approval once switched on, with Read AI disclaiming liability for them in its Terms.
Lifted by a broad set reached from cheap plans: on Free, Google Calendar, Zoom Calendar and Outlook in Microsoft 365, Gmail and Outlook Readouts, Slack (push to public channels and Sync Slack to Read) and Microsoft Teams for work or school accounts, plus a REST API and an MCP server, both in open beta and both on every plan including Free (the MCP server has 14 tools as of October 2026, can send a Read notetaker to a live meeting, and Read AI names ChatGPT and Codex, Claude, Microsoft Copilot Studio, Gamma, Perplexity, VS Code and Cursor as clients); from Pro, premium integrations with Salesforce (tasks and call logs on contacts, leads, accounts and opportunities), HubSpot (contacts, companies, deals, deal-stage recommendations), Notion (subpages or database entries), Jira, Confluence, Asana, Linear, Zapier (trigger New Meeting Notes) and webhooks (20 per user plus 20 per Workspace, HMAC SHA-256 signing on webhooks created since mid-March 2026). Held back by premium integrations needing Pro ($15 per user per month billed annually or $19.75 billed monthly), a small API (three endpoints, 10 results per page, 100 requests per minute per user, OAuth 2.1 only, no static API keys), live data through the API and MCP only while someone has the live dashboard open unless Live Transcription is on, CRM sync limited to external participants and dependent on the calendar invite (manual adds need a manual push), user webhooks firing on meeting end only, uploads never triggering webhooks, one Google, one Microsoft and one Zoom account per Read account, and no Apple iCloud Calendar or Outlook outside Microsoft 365.
Lifted by a no-card start (a 7-day Enterprise trial that begins automatically at sign-up and falls back to Free), reports usually ready in 5 to 15 minutes, apps for Windows, macOS, iPhone and Android, a browser extension, a Zoom App and a Teams app, chat commands any participant can use (Read stop keeps a report up to that point, Opt out deletes everything) and a live dashboard during the meeting. Held back by defaults that work against the user: once a calendar is connected Read joins all calendar events (onboarding marks All calendar events as Recommended, and the trial joins every meeting by default) and sends the recap to everyone with access, and Read AI's own help warns that users who skim the settings are surprised when Read joins all meetings or sends a summary to everyone; several attendees with Read each bring their own assistant unless one marks the meeting private; stopping it takes the Auto-Join Preferences path, and cancelling a plan does not stop it. Platform rules add friction: on Zoom the user must have connected Zoom and be in the meeting signed in; on Teams anonymous join must be enabled and Teams calls started from Chat cannot be joined; Google Meet native recording needs someone to approve a consent pop-up within 10 minutes of the start; Read leaves if not admitted within 10 minutes; and in desktop or mobile capture Read is invisible to others, so the user must tell participants and collect consent.
Priced per user (license) per month: Free $0 with no card; Pro $15 per user per month billed annually or $19.75 billed monthly; Enterprise $22.50 per user per month billed annually or $29.75 per user per month billed monthly; Enterprise+ $29.75 per user per month billed annually or $39.75 billed monthly, requiring 5+ licenses (Read AI labels annual billing -25%, about 24-25% by our arithmetic). Lifted by unlimited reports on every paid plan, Ask Read, Ada, Meeting Coach, the API and the MCP server on Free, EDU plans at $60 or $100 per license per year (annual only), volume discounts of 10% / 15% / 20% at 100 / 500 / 1,000 annual licenses and Read's premium features at no cost for 12 months through Zoom Essential Apps for Zoom One Pro, Business or Business Plus subscribers. Held back by a Free plan limited to 5 meeting reports a month (shared reports count) and 1-hour meetings with no upload minutes; audio and video playback only from Enterprise; HIPAA and audit logs only on Enterprise+ billed annually, and SAML SSO and SCIM only on Enterprise+, which requires 5+ licenses ($1,785 a year at minimum billed annually, by our arithmetic); every person in a Workspace needing a license on the same plan; a Pro price above Fireflies Pro ($10 per seat per month billed annually or $18 billed monthly) and Otter Pro ($8.33 per user per month billed annually or $16.99 billed monthly); upload minutes that reset monthly with extras at $20 per 500 minutes; and no refunds under the Terms and the pricing FAQ, including mid-period cancellations.
Lifted by support by web form or support@read.ai with an average response under 1 business day and prioritized support on Enterprise and Enterprise+ (Read AI says), Workspace onboarding with a specialist on Enterprise+, SOC 2 Type 2 (report from the Trust Center), AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.2+ in transit, a documented behavior at the meeting-length limit (Read leaves and builds the report from what it recorded) and upgrade reprocessing of the past 30 days of reports. Held back by an API and MCP server still in open beta, capture that depends on outside platform rules (the November 2026 Zoom change that ended sending Read alone to Zoom meetings, Teams guest settings and human verification, Google's changes that Read AI cites when recommending Meet native recording over the bot), Add Read turning off for a recurring series after 3 failed meetings in a row, uploads that can take up to 24 hours, webhooks disabled after 25 consecutive failures, 2FA not enforced for username and password logins, no refunds, and a Trustpilot record whose complaints include account and login problems, support and billing.
Mean of each platform's displayed rating with at least 30 reviews, weighted by review count, read 5 Nov 2026: (App Store, Google Play, G2, Trustpilot) gives 4.71 computed. The app stores carry almost all the weight (about 96% of the counted reviews), so the score reflects mobile users' view of the app; G2 sits at 4.0 on a small count of reviews; Trustpilot, low and dominated by 1-2 star reviews, is read as a complaint map, not a trend: the assistant joining meetings uninvited, spam-like emails inviting participants to sign up, difficulty deleting the account, account and login problems, support and billing, each matching a documented mechanism (auto-join to all calendar events by default, summaries shared with all attendees with a sign-up invitation for non-users, deletion only by the account holder). No ad-hoc penalty is applied. Capterra and TrustRadius scores could not be confirmed and are not counted.
Lifted by a large help center at support.read.ai that answers most questions in detail (plan gates, quotas, upload credits, auto-join settings, removal and opt-out per platform, account deletion, HIPAA set-up, SAML and SCIM, Workspace settings, retention) and developer documentation for the API, MCP server and webhooks (endpoints, rate limits, OAuth 2.1, payloads, signing, retries), plus a dated change log in Read AI's monthly posts. Held back by help articles that are mostly undated, product pages that contradict the help center (the read.ai/zoom page's older Zoom Apps limits against the help center's, the uploads page's per-minute rate with a minimum, iOS 17.5 against iOS 18.0, Slack labelled Premium though it works on Free, Notion database entries marked unsupported), Read AI articles that print old or wrong own prices and gates (playback on Pro, HIPAA on every plan), 2023 posts still describing a 14-day trial, a pricing matrix that still lists deprecated Gmail extension features, and language counts that differ between the pricing page and the help center.
Weighted across the axes above (weights reflect what actually drives the decision in this category). How we score →
Frequently asked questions
Does everyone in the meeting need a Read AI account?+
No. Only one person needs a Read account, Free included, to create and share a report. Recipients need a free account to view it unless the link is set to Anyone with the link.
What happens when a meeting runs past the plan's length limit?+
Read leaves the meeting and builds the report from what it recorded up to then. The limits are 1 hour on Free, 4 hours on Pro and Enterprise, and 8 hours on Enterprise+.
Is there a student or teacher price?+
Yes. With a .edu email, EDU costs $60 a year and EDU + Video costs $100 a year, billed annually only. EDU plans cannot create or join Workspaces and do not include premium integrations.
How do I delete a Read AI account?+
Cancel any paid plan first, then go to Account Settings, Advanced, Delete Account. Deletion is permanent, removes reports you own, and only the account holder can do it.
The bottom line
Read AI is a real, well-funded product from a Seattle team with a credible founder, and its meeting reports, coaching and free API access hold up against what it charges. Pro at $15 per user per month billed annually covers most small teams, and Enterprise earns its place only if you need playback. The risk is the setup, not the software. Change auto-join and recap sharing before connecting a calendar, remember there are no refunds, and our score reflects a tool worth using on those terms.
- [1] Plans & Pricing (2026-11) https://www.read.ai/plans-pricing
- [2] Read AI help: How do I add Read to a meeting? (2026-11) https://support.read.ai/hc/en-us/articles/29350564735123-How-do-I-add-Read-to-a-meeting
- [3] Read AI help: How do I create a Read account? (2026-11) https://support.read.ai/hc/en-us/articles/23264974446995-How-do-I-create-a-Read-account
- [4] Terms of Service (2026-11) https://www.read.ai/termsofservice
- [p1] Confluence