Summarizing is one of the most common use cases of various AI models. Multiple tools have summarized articles, PDFs, videos, and transcripts. Meeting intelligence tool Read has introduced a new feature that condenses an hour-long meeting into a two-minute clip of important tips.
The company said it uses large language models — without specifying which ones — combined with video analytics to understand the salient parts of the meeting. Read also includes participants’ responses in the highlight reel. Users can go to their meeting recording and turn off the “Play Highlights Only” toggle to view the abbreviated clip.
Image Credits: Read.ai
Read was co-founded in 2021 by David Shim, former CEO of Foursquare, to collect meeting information. The tool, which works with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex, gives you analytics like participant sentiment and engagement scores to provide knowledge about the effectiveness of a meeting. The company has raised $10 million in seed funding from investors such as Madrona Venture Group and PSL Ventures.
Shim said it’s very boring to watch a recording of an hour long meeting. He compared watching the two-minute reel to watching highlights of a sports game. He also said that during the testing period, the company found that some customers had impressive productivity gains.
“During a preview period, agency customers experienced a 30%+ increase in employee productivity. Tedious tasks, including composing notes, were completed automatically, and sharing these notes along with manually generated video highlights eliminated the need to set up a meeting to talk about the last meeting,” he said in a statement .
Image Credits: Read
In January, Read introduced a text-based digest powered by OpenAI’s GPT model. The video highlights feature is an evolution of that. The demo below shows that the highlights sometimes interrupt the speaker mid-sentence, which gets annoying when you’re trying to listen to key points. The company said it is working on improving this aspect.
Read also noted that it will include text summaries in the videos using captions in the coming weeks.
Countless companies — including Otter and Zoom — are working to provide AI-assisted meeting summaries. While most of them use some sort of grand language model, Read’s approach of having a short TikTok-style video recap might appeal to a person who wants to flip through multiple missed meetings.