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

Summarization is one of the common use cases of different AI models, and we now have multiple tools that shrink articles, PDFs, videos and transcripts into easily digestible pieces of information. Now, meeting intelligence tool Read has introduced a new feature that trims an hour-long meeting into a two-minute clip, accompanied by important pointers.

The company says it is using large language models — it didn’t specify which one — combined with video analysis to pick out the most notable parts of the meeting. Read also incorporates participants’ reactions in a 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. The tool, which works with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Webex, gives you analytics like sentiment as well as participant engagement scores to measure the effectiveness of a meeting. The company has raised $10 million in seed funding from investors including Madrona Venture Group and PSL Ventures.

Shim compared watching the two-minute reel to watching the highlights of a sports game. He also said that during the test period, the company found that some clients had an impactful increase in productivity.

“During a preview period, agency clients experienced a 30%+ increase in productivity for employees. Tedious tasks including pulling together notes were completed automatically, and the sharing of 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.

In January, Read introduced a text-based summary feature that was powered by OpenAI’s GPT model. The video highlight feature is an evolution of that. The demo below shows that, at times, the highlights cut off the speaker mid-sentence, which can be annoying when trying to listen to important points. The company said it is working on improving this aspect.

Read also noted that it will incorporate text summaries in the videos using captions in the coming weeks.

Tons of companies — including Otter and Zoom — are working on providing AI-aided summaries of meetings. While most of them use some kind of large language model, Read’s approach to having a TikTok-style short video summary can appeal to people looking to skim through multiple missed meetings.