READ.AI The assistant that joins the meeting even alone

Last month, I found myself with two overlapping appointments. An in-person meeting and an online call with suppliers—same time, same day. I did what everyone does: I chose the most important one and asked my colleagues for a summary of the other. The summary, as usual, never arrived.

Read.ai serves exactly this purpose. It is an assistant that takes notes for you during online meetings, and it does so better than a person can while participating in the discussion.

The way it works is simple. You connect your calendar—either Google Calendar or Microsoft 365 Outlook—and from that moment on, the assistant joins scheduled meetings on its own. It works on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, the three platforms now found in every office. It joins as a visible participant, records, transcribes, and a few minutes after the end, a report arrives via email with a summary, the topics covered, decisions made, and a list of who needs to do what. Italian is among the more than twenty-five recognized languages, and notes are generated in the language spoken during the meeting.

For in-person meetings, there is a recording feature via the desktop and mobile app without any assistant appearing in the room, but that function is reserved for paid plans.

The most striking part is something else. If the meeting is in the calendar and the option is active, the assistant joins even when you cannot be there. At six in the evening, you find the minutes of a meeting you didn't attend. Convenient, yet sensitive. That’s why it should be used with three specific precautions.

The first concerns costs and control. The free plan gives you five reports per month, with a maximum of one hour per meeting, which is more than enough to see if the tool is right for you. The Pro plan costs $19.75 per month, dropping to $15 with annual billing. Practical advice: don't let it join everywhere. On the application's Calendar page, you can toggle it on or off meeting by meeting; manually activating it only for the meetings that matter prevents your inbox from filling up with useless minutes.

The second concerns Swiss law, and here attention must be heightened. Article 179ter of the Criminal Code punishes, upon complaint, anyone who records a non-public conversation without the consent of the other participants. The penalty can be up to one year. The Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner specifies that consent must be obtained before recording and must be clear about the purpose. Read.ai automatically states in the chat who invited it, and on Google Meet and Teams, it only takes one participant saying no for it not to enter. The fact remains that a few words spoken at the beginning of the meeting are worth more than any automated message.

The third concerns confidentiality. The service sends the report to all meeting invitees, including those external to the company. Before a negotiation with a supplier or an interview with a candidate, it is worth going through the sharing settings and verifying who will receive what. In a Ticino SME, where the supplier is often also the neighbor in the next warehouse, this detail matters.

A final technical note that carries significant weight in our canton. Meetings that switch from Italian to German to English within the same half-hour are not handled well: the transcription becomes incoherent. In the settings, you can force the report language, and those working with Zurich or Germany would do well to set it immediately.

The true value of these tools is not the transcription. It is the fact that you can finally be in a meeting and truly listen instead of writing. Anyone taking notes loses half the discussion—we all know it and have been pretending otherwise for twenty years. Try it at your next internal meeting, the one where a mistake costs nothing. And tell your colleagues before you press the button.

All info at: https://www.read.ai/

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