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. Multiple tools have come up with a summarization of articles, PDFs, videos, and transcripts. Meeting intelligence tool Read has introduced a new feature that trims an hour-long meeting into a two-minute clip with important pointers.

The company said that it is using large language models — without specifying which one — combined with video analysis to understand the most notable parts of the meeting. Read also incorporates participants’ reactions in 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 knowledge about the effectiveness of a meeting. The company has raised $10 million in seed funding from investors like Madrona Venture Group and PSL Ventures.

Shim said that watching a recording of an hour-long meeting is very boring. He compared watching the two-minute reel to watching highlights of a sports game. He also mentioned 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 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 the speaker mid-sentence, which becomes annoying 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, it will incorporate text summaries in the videos using captions.

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-styled short video summary can appeal to a person looking to skim through multiple missed meetings.

Read’s AI-powered summary feature squeezes a meeting into a two-minute clip by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch