Read’s AI-powered summary feature turns a meeting into a two-minute clip

Synthesis is one of the common use cases of different AI models. Several tools offered summaries of articles, PDFs, videos, and transcripts. Meeting intelligence tool Read has introduced a new feature that cuts a one-hour meeting into a two-minute clip with important pointers.

The company said it used large language models — without specifying which — combined with video analysis to understand the most notable parts of the meeting. Read also incorporates participant reactions into the highlight reel. Users can go to their recording of a meeting and turn off the “Play Highlights Only” toggle to see the condensed clip.

Read was co-founded in 2021 by former Foursquare CEO David Shim to gather meeting intelligence. The tool, which works with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Webex, gives you analytics like sentiment and participant engagement scores to provide insights into a meeting’s effectiveness. The company has raised $10 million in seed funding from investors including Madrona Venture Group and PSL Ventures.

Shim said watching a recording of an hour-long meeting is very boring. He compared watching the two-minute reel to watching the highlights of a sports game. He also mentioned that during the test period, the company found that some customers had a significant increase in productivity.

“During a preview period, agency clients experienced a more than 30% increase in employee productivity. Tedious tasks, including compiling notes, were done automatically, and sharing of these notes along with manually generated video clips eliminated the need to schedule a meeting to discuss the last meeting,” he said in a statement.

In January, Read presented a text summary powered by OpenAI’s GPT model. The video highlight function is an evolution of this. The demo below shows that sometimes the highlights cut out the speaker in the middle of a sentence, which becomes distracting when trying to listen to important points. The company said it is working on improving this aspect.

Read also noted that in the coming weeks he will embed text summaries into videos using captions.

Tons of companies — including Otter and Zoom — are working to provide AI-assisted meeting summaries. While most of them use some sort of big language model, Read’s approach of having a short TikTok-style video summary may appeal to someone looking to skim through several missed meetings.