Read.ai is an AI tool that joins your video meetings to record, transcribe, and analyze what happens during calls.

It works with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, automatically capturing audio and turning it into text as you speak. During meetings, attendees can see a live summary of the discussion if this feature is turned on.

After meetings end, Read.ai creates a report that breaks down what was discussed, lists action items, and shows who talked for how long. It also looks at the tone of conversations to figure out if they were positive or negative, and gives attention scores to measure how engaged people were. The tool can spot key topics and important decisions made during calls.

Read.ai can also handle other workplace communications like Slack message threads and email conversations to create summaries. All transcripts and summaries go into a searchable database, so you can find specific information from past meetings using AI-powered search. The system helps teams keep track of decisions and discussions across multiple meetings and communication channels.

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

• Poor transcription and unreliable summaries - Users often find that Read.ai gets things wrong, especially with technical terms, proper names, or speakers with accents. This leads to meeting summaries that miss important details or misrepresent what actually happened. A software development team might find that technical terms are consistently wrong, making the meeting summary useless for follow-up work.

• Privacy and security worries - Many users feel uncomfortable with an AI tool recording, processing, and storing sensitive business conversations, especially when dealing with confidential projects or client information. Legal or healthcare professionals might avoid Read.ai due to compliance requirements and concerns about where their meeting data is stored and who can access it.

• Making people less engaged in meetings - Users report that when Read.ai is present, meeting participants pay less attention and participate less, assuming the AI will capture everything important. This leads to worse listening and participation. Team members might multitask or zone out during meetings, thinking they can just review the AI summary later, which hurts real-time collaboration and decision-making.

How Circleback can help

People choose Circleback because it fixes the main problems that have frustrated users of other AI meeting tools while delivering a more polished, trustworthy experience.

Better Accuracy Through Smarter Processing While Read.ai users regularly complain about transcription errors with technical terms and accented speakers, Circleback has built advanced speech recognition that adapts to industry-specific vocabulary and different speaking patterns. The platform learns from context and keeps updated dictionaries for technical fields, creating much more reliable transcripts that teams can actually trust for follow-up actions. This accuracy carries over to the AI-generated summaries, which capture nuanced discussions instead of missing crucial details.

Enterprise-Level Security That Builds Trust Where Read.ai leaves users worried about data privacy, Circleback has made security a core feature. The platform offers strong encryption, clear data policies, and compliance certifications that give legal, healthcare, and other sensitive industries the confidence to use AI meeting assistance. Users know exactly where their data lives, how it's protected, and who can access it - removing the anxiety that holds back adoption of other tools.

Boosting Rather Than Replacing Human Engagement Most importantly, Circleback has designed its interface and features to support human attention rather than replace it. Instead of creating a crutch that makes people zone out, Circleback provides real-time insights and gentle engagement cues that keep participants more focused and involved. The tool highlights when action items are being discussed or when decisions need input, actually improving meeting quality rather than hurting human participation.

This thoughtful approach to AI meeting assistance explains why teams increasingly pick Circleback - it delivers the productivity benefits they want without the reliability issues, security concerns, or engagement problems that have frustrated users of other platforms.

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