Circleback is an AI meeting assistant that joins your video calls on Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet as a participant called the "Read Assistant." During meetings, it shows live dashboards with metrics like how much each person talks, their speaking pace, and the room's overall mood. The tool writes down conversations as they happen and creates meeting summaries and action items after calls end.

The platform focuses on meeting analytics and offers detailed reports that track speakers, count filler words, note interruptions, and score energy levels. It has enterprise search that helps you find specific topics across all your company's meeting transcripts. Read.ai connects with tools like Notion, Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, and Confluence to sync meeting summaries into your existing workflows.

Read.ai supports about 15 languages for transcription, though sentiment analysis works mainly in English. The service runs entirely through web browsers without desktop or mobile apps, and recordings get processed in the cloud rather than stored locally. Pricing starts with a free plan that includes 5 live meetings per month, with paid plans beginning at $19.75 per user monthly for unlimited meetings and reports.

Users look for alternatives to Read.ai because...

• Transcription gets things wrong - Users say Read.ai's AI transcription and summaries can be unreliable, especially when people have accents or speak fast. This makes the meeting outputs less useful, particularly for diverse teams or international meetings.

• Long waits for results - The platform can take up to an hour after a meeting ends before the recording and analysis show up. This delay slows down teams that need quick access to meeting insights and action items for immediate follow-up.

• Too much going on - The flood of metrics and analytics features can overwhelm users, making it hard to quickly find and focus on what matters most. This complexity can hurt adoption, especially for people who want simpler, more streamlined tools.

How Circleback can help

People choose Circleback because it delivers what Read.ai promises but with a more polished, user-focused approach. While Read.ai broke new ground with meeting analytics and impressive features like real-time sentiment scoring and talk-time metrics, users consistently hit roadblocks that Circleback has carefully solved.

Better transcription that actually works

Circleback has poured resources into advanced speech recognition technology that handles diverse accents, rapid speech, and overlapping conversations with impressive accuracy. Unlike Read.ai's struggles with non-native speakers and fast talkers, Circleback's AI models learn from diverse language datasets, making it especially valuable for global teams and multicultural organizations where accurate transcription isn't just helpful—it's essential for inclusive collaboration.

Results in minutes, not hours

Where Read.ai makes users wait up to an hour for meeting insights, Circleback delivers comprehensive summaries and action items within minutes. This quick turnaround changes how teams operate after meetings, allowing immediate follow-up on commitments and decisions while conversations are still fresh. The speed advantage particularly helps fast-moving sales teams and agile development cycles where delayed insights lose their punch.

Clean, focused design

Circleback takes a "smart simplicity" approach to meeting analytics. Rather than bombarding users with every possible metric like Read.ai does, Circleback puts the most actionable insights front and center while keeping advanced analytics available but out of the way. Users consistently praise how they can quickly scan for key decisions, action items, and next steps without swimming through excessive data. The interface learns from how you work to highlight the metrics that matter most to your team.

Reliability you can count on

Perhaps most importantly, Circleback has built its reputation on consistency. While Read.ai's innovative features sometimes come with reliability hiccups, Circleback focuses on delivering core meeting intelligence that teams can depend on every single day. This reliability makes it easier for organizations to fully weave meeting AI into their workflows, knowing the tool will perform when it matters most. Learn more about signing up for Circleback to experience the difference for yourself.

Circleback provides best-in-class AI meeting notes and automations

Circleback provides best-in-class AI-powered meeting notes and automations. We support over 100 languages and automatic participant identification in both in-person and online meetings.

• Automatically-identified and assigned action items

• AI-enabled search across all meetings

• Automations with 100+ app integrations

• Industry-leading security with SOC 2 Type II, EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, and HIPAA compliance

• Ability to capture both online and in-person meetings with desktop and mobile apps