A factual 2025 overview of Read AI: Features, pricing & privacy concerns

It feels like there’s a new AI productivity tool popping up every week, right? AI meeting assistants, especially, are grabbing headlines by promising to take over the boring task of note-taking. They transcribe and summarize your calls, supposedly saving you hours of work. One of the names you’ll probably bump into is Read AI, an app that’s known for its automatic meeting notes and its ability to connect the dots between conversations on different platforms.

But what’s really going on behind the curtain? This post is a straightforward, no-fluff look at Read AI. We’ll go over its features and pricing, but more importantly, we’re going to get into the big data privacy and permission concerns that have made users (and even entire universities) a little nervous. Let’s figure out if the convenience is worth the potential security headache.

What is Read AI?

At its core, Read AI is an AI copilot built to listen in on your work conversations and pull out the important bits. It connects to your meetings, emails, and messages to create summaries, full transcripts, and searchable notes. The big idea is to automate the tedious parts of meetings so you can actually focus on the conversation, knowing all the key details are being saved.

It’s designed to work with the tools you already use, like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. By linking up with your calendar and email, it tries to become a single source of truth for everything you discuss, making it easier to track down action items or decisions later on. It’s a compelling pitch, but the way it gets that deep integration is where things start to get a bit complicated.

A deep dive into Read AI features

Read AI has a pretty impressive list of features for automating and analyzing your meetings. But to get the full picture, you have to look at how they work and what they ask of you in return.

The Read AI meeting assistant and summaries

The main job of Read AI is to act as a bot that joins your calls to record, transcribe, and whip up detailed summaries. These aren’t just basic text dumps; they include AI-powered highlights, action items with names attached, and a list of the key questions that came up. It even has a "Speaker Coach" that gives you feedback on your talking speed and use of filler words if you’re looking to polish your presentation skills.

This all sounds great, but the "automated" part can be a double-edged sword. Some people have shared stories of the bot showing up to their meetings totally uninvited, just because the event was on their calendar. It can lead to some pretty awkward moments when a strange bot crashes your call, which is a clear sign that its automation can feel more invasive than helpful.

Read AI’s unified search copilot

The "Search Copilot" is one of Read AI’s standout features. It essentially acts as a search engine for all your past conversations. You can ask it questions to find info buried in old meetings, emails, and chats. Can’t remember what your team decided about the Q3 budget? You can just ask the Search Copilot.

This is an incredibly useful tool for digging up information, but it’s also the exact reason the app needs such far-reaching permissions. And that’s the catch, isn’t it? For it to search everything, it needs to see everything. This powerful capability is the root of many of the privacy concerns we’ll get into next.

Read AI integrations and platforms

Read AI connects with a lot of common business tools, including Google, Microsoft, Zoom, Slack, Salesforce, and others. It also offers a Chrome Extension and an iOS app to fit into your workflow. Just remember, every tool you connect is another door you’re opening to your company’s data, often with very broad access rights.

The hidden cost of Read AI: Permissions and privacy concerns

While Read AI’s features look good on paper, they come with a price that isn’t on their website: your data privacy. The level of access the tool demands has set off alarm bells for both individual users and company IT departments.

Why are Read AI’s permissions so extensive?

When you sign up for Read AI, you’re not just giving it a little peek into your work; you’re basically handing over the keys to the building. Users on Reddit were pretty shocked at the permissions it asks for, which include:

• Complete access to your calendars.

• The ability to read and create online meetings on your behalf.

• Full access to log in and read your user profile.

• Permission to hold onto all the data it’s been granted, indefinitely.

The company says this is all for a "seamless" experience. For a lot of people, though, it just feels like too much, especially if you’re just trying to view a transcript someone else shared with you. It feels a bit like a "growth hack," where the tool is designed to spread inside organizations at the expense of genuine user consent and data safety.

Real-world Read AI examples and security warnings

This isn’t just a few grumpy people on Reddit, either. The University of Pittsburgh, for instance, has published an official notice warning that Read AI is not approved for use because of security compliance problems. They even created a guide telling people how to kick the app out of their accounts to stay compliant with university rules. When a major institution has to write a manual on how to remove your software, that’s a pretty serious red flag.

This lines up with what users are saying about the bot auto-joining meetings and the general feeling that the tool is, as one person put it, "AI malware." This approach is a huge contrast to tools that put security first from day one. For instance, platforms like eesel AI are built on a different philosophy. They let you scope knowledge and give you fine-grained control, making sure the AI only touches the specific data it needs for a task instead of demanding access to your entire digital life.

Read AI pricing plans explained

Let’s talk money. Read AI breaks its pricing into four main tiers. The costs are per user, which can get expensive fast if you have a whole team. The "Free" plan is pretty restrictive, and you can’t even get video playback unless you spring for the pricey Enterprise plan.

A secure and customizable alternative: eesel AI

If you want the benefits of an AI assistant without the invasive permissions and security worries, it’s worth checking out alternatives that were built with a different mindset.

Go live in minutes with total control, not invasive permissions

Getting started with Read AI often involves a scary-looking permissions screen that makes you feel like you’re signing away your digital soul. On the other hand, eesel AI is completely self-serve. You can get it up and running in a few minutes without having to sit through a sales call or approve invasive access requests.

More importantly, eesel AI is all about selective automation. You are in complete control. You decide which tickets or questions the AI should handle. You can start small by letting it answer simple, repetitive queries and have it pass everything else to a human. Unlike tools that might just show up in your meetings, eesel AI works within the boundaries you draw.

Unify knowledge without sacrificing privacy

While Read AI is focused on listening to your conversations, eesel AI helps you bring together a much wider range of company knowledge in a secure way. You can connect it to your help articles, past support tickets, and internal wikis in tools like Confluence or Google Docs.

The key difference is that eesel AI was designed with privacy at its core. Your data is never used to train some giant, anonymous AI model; it’s always kept separate to power your bots and your bots alone. You can point the AI to specific knowledge sources, so it only knows what you want it to know. It’s a fundamentally safer approach that keeps you in the driver’s seat.

Test with confidence using risk-free simulation

Maybe the biggest difference is the ability to launch with confidence. Before eesel AI ever talks to a customer or employee, you can run it in a powerful simulation mode. Think of it like a dress rehearsal for your AI. It lets you test the bot on thousands of your past tickets in a safe environment. You can see exactly how it would have performed, predict how many issues it will solve, and spot any gaps in your knowledge base. This completely gets rid of the "rogue bot" fear that comes with tools you can’t properly test before they go live.

Making the right choice for your team

So, what’s the verdict on Read AI? It definitely offers some powerful features for analyzing meetings and finding information. There’s no question it could save you time. But that convenience comes with a big catch: major trade-offs in data privacy, user control, and organizational security. The aggressive permissions, combined with real stories of weird behavior and official warnings from institutions, make it a gamble for many businesses.

If your team is in a regulated industry or just has a strong security policy, that invasive approach might be a deal-breaker. The choice is pretty clear: if you just need a personal tool for meeting notes and you’re okay with the broad permissions, Read AI might do the trick. But if you’re a business looking for a secure, controllable, and deeply integrated AI platform, you need a solution built on trust and transparency from the ground up.

Ready to try an AI assistant that respects your data?

If you’re looking for a powerful AI platform that puts you in control and takes your security seriously, give eesel AI a look. You can set it up in minutes, test it with confidence, and start automating support without compromising on privacy.