An honest look at Read AI reviews: Features, flaws, and a better alternative

AI meeting assistants like Read AI sound like a dream, don’t they? They promise to end the drudgery of note-taking by automatically transcribing, summarizing, and analyzing every conversation. In theory, an AI copilot that remembers every detail is a huge win for productivity.

But as more teams actually start using these tools, a different picture is starting to form. A lot of people looking for Read AI reviews are doing so because they’ve heard whispers of some serious issues, from privacy concerns to aggressive, almost malware-like behavior.

So, let’s cut through the marketing fluff. In this guide, we’ll take an honest look at Read AI, what it promises, what users are actually saying, and what it costs. Most importantly, we’ll explore a safer, saner way to use AI to tap into your company’s knowledge without putting your security on the line.

What is Read AI?

Read AI calls itself an "AI copilot" that works across your meetings, emails, and messages. The main idea is that it joins your virtual calls on platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams to record and transcribe everything. The goal is to build a searchable library of all your conversations, turning unstructured chats into something you can actually use.

According to their website, the platform offers a few key things:

• Automated Summaries and Transcripts: It spits out meeting recaps, action items, and key moments after a call.

• Meeting Analytics: This is where it gets a bit… much. It gives you metrics on who’s talking, their sentiment, and even their "charisma."

• Search Copilot: An AI-powered search tool that lets you dig for information across all your recorded calls, emails, and chats.

• Personalized Coaching: It gives you feedback on how fast you talk, how many filler words you use, and whether your language is inclusive.

On paper, it sounds pretty comprehensive for any team feeling buried in back-to-back meetings. But the real-world user experience seems to tell a different story.

A breakdown of Read AI’s core features

Before we get into the messy stuff, let’s quickly cover what Read AI is supposed to do. The platform is built around automating meeting notes and then trying to analyze them.

Meeting reports and transcription

This is the bread and butter of the tool. After a call, Read AI gives you a full transcript showing who said what, a quick summary of the conversation, and a list of topics and action items it picked up on. It’s meant to save you the hassle of taking notes so nothing gets missed.

"Deep dive" analytics and coaching

Here’s where Read AI tries to stand out, and also where things get a little weird. It doesn’t just transcribe; it analyzes how people are talking. The platform gives you scores for engagement and sentiment, showing who dominated the conversation and how people supposedly felt.

It also has a "Coaching" tab with feedback on your speaking pace and word choice. The idea is to help you get better at meetings, but many users find these features questionable. The metrics can feel arbitrary, and as many Read AI reviews mention, sentiment analysis can easily misinterpret jokes or cultural nuances, leading to some awkward and inaccurate feedback.

Search Copilot for unified knowledge

Read AI’s "Search Copilot" is designed to be a search engine for all your spoken and written conversations. You can ask it questions and get answers pulled from any recorded call, email, or message it has access to. The aim is to connect the dots between different conversations. But for this to work, you have to give it wide-open access to your communications, which brings us to the elephant in the room: privacy.

This is a totally different approach from a tool like eesel AI, which focuses on searching the knowledge bases you already have and trust, like your Confluence pages or Google Docs. It gives you secure answers without having to record and store all of your team’s private chats.

An infographic illustrating how eesel AI securely unifies knowledge from your existing trusted sources, a key difference highlighted in Read AI reviews.:

What the Read AI reviews really say: A pattern of privacy issues

A quick search for Read AI reviews uncovers a pretty consistent and troubling theme across sites like Trustpilot, Reddit, and official app stores. While a few people find the summaries useful, the vast majority report serious problems that make the tool sound more like a virus than a helpful assistant.

It just shows up, uninvited

The single biggest complaint is that Read AI joins meetings without anyone’s permission. People report that after they click on a Read AI summary shared by someone else, the tool hooks into their calendar and starts showing up to all of their calls automatically.

It spreads like a computer worm, said one person on Reddit, explaining that you’re forced to sign up and grant full calendar access just to see a single report.

Reddit

• Over on Trustpilot, where Read AI has a shocking 1.5 out of 5 stars, one review calls it "basically AI malware." Dozens of other reviews echo this, calling it invasive and a "virus."

• This got so bad that the University of Washington officially blocked Read AI, citing "security and privacy risks to institutional data." They confirmed it can join meetings without attendees even knowing it’s there.

Good luck getting your data deleted

Once Read AI has recorded one of your meetings, users say it’s next to impossible to get that data deleted. This is a massive red flag, especially for any business that deals with sensitive client information or has to comply with regulations like GDPR.

Despite my requests, they refuse to delete it.

Reddit

• Another user on Trustpilot canceled their subscription only to find that Read AI was still recording their meetings, and customer support wouldn’t help.

This aggressive approach is a world away from privacy-focused platforms. For example, eesel AI is built on the idea of using the knowledge you already have. It connects to your helpdesk and internal wikis, but it never records your calls or stores conversations without a clear purpose, and your data is never used to train generalized models.

Flawed and potentially harmful features

Even when the tool is working as it’s "supposed" to, the analytical features get a lot of criticism. The sentiment analysis is often called "tone-deaf" and has the potential to damage working relationships by misreading a conversation. One user mentioned a great, casual team meeting was flagged with "Sentiment POOR," probably because the team was using slang or making jokes.

Read AI pricing: What to expect

Read AI has a few pricing tiers. There’s a free plan, but it’s so limited that it basically forces you toward a paid subscription to get any real use out of it.

A couple of things jump out here:

• No video playback on cheaper plans: You can’t actually watch the meeting recording on the Free or Pro plans. For a tool that records meetings, that’s a pretty big feature to leave out.

• Confusing license rules: That little note on the Enterprise+ plan that "Requires 10+ licenses" has tripped people up. As one Trustpilot review detailed, this can lead to surprise charges in the hundreds of dollars.

This lack of clarity is a major issue. For comparison, platforms like eesel AI offer straightforward pricing with no hidden fees, so your costs don’t suddenly balloon as your team starts to use it more.

A safer alternative: AI that uses your existing knowledge

The problems that keep popping up in Read AI reviews point to a basic flaw in its whole philosophy: it tries to create a knowledge base by recording everything, invited or not. A much better approach is to use an AI that can securely tap into the trusted knowledge your team has already spent time creating.

This is where eesel AI comes in. Instead of a bot crashing your calls, eesel is an AI platform that integrates safely and directly with the tools you already use.

• Get up and running in minutes: eesel AI is designed to be self-serve. You can connect it to your helpdesk (like Zendesk or Intercom) and knowledge sources (like Confluence or Google Docs) with simple, one-click integrations. No sales call needed.

A screenshot showing how eesel AI connects to your existing knowledge sources, a safer approach according to Read AI reviews.:

• Unify your real knowledge: It learns from your company’s past support tickets, help articles, and internal wikis to provide accurate answers. It doesn’t need to eavesdrop on your private conversations to know what’s going on.

• You’re in complete control: You decide exactly what information the AI can see and what it can do. You can even simulate how it would have answered past support tickets to see how it performs before you let it talk to customers.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation feature, which allows you to test the AI's performance with past data before deployment, a control feature missing in many tools discussed in Read AI reviews.:

By starting with your curated, trusted documents, you sidestep all the privacy nightmares and intrusive behavior that come with tools like Read AI.

Look beyond meeting recorders for a true AI assistant

While Read AI has some interesting features, the overwhelming number of negative Read AI reviews about its aggressive behavior and serious privacy flaws make it a risky bet for any professional team. Its model of recording every conversation just creates unnecessary security risks and headaches.

For businesses that want to get real value from AI, the answer isn’t recording more meetings. It’s about securely using the knowledge you already have. Platforms like eesel AI offer a much smarter way forward, giving you powerful automation that respects your data, fits into your workflow, and puts you in the driver’s seat.

Ready to see how a privacy-first AI can help your team? Get started with eesel AI in minutes.