Read AI

Capture meetings and turn them into transcripts, notes, and engagement summaries

KINDA · partial replacement
price $19.75/mosubscription / year $237estimated build time multi-dayreplaced by 0 people

The core loop is buildable, but a dependable replacement becomes a real weekend or multi-day project. For Read AI, capture meetings and turn them into transcripts, notes, and engagement summaries. The hard boundary is meeting-platform bots, email recaps, analytics, and team workspaces, plus capture reliability, integrations, and collaboration.

Build verification: not recorded. How we judge buildability

What you give up

  • meeting-platform bots, email recaps, analytics, and team workspaces
  • calendar auto-join
  • reliable speaker diarization
  • mobile capture
  • team search and sharing

Why people still pay

People still pay for Read AI because a meeting tool must capture every call without surprising anyone, then make the result searchable and shareable across a team. The recurring cost buys audio permissions, model updates, calendar APIs, storage, speaker correction, and sync, not just the visible interface.

Your build guide

The stack, security requirements, and agent rules for a focused replacement.

Before you start

  • Runtime and tools: Python, FastAPI, SQLite, FFmpeg and a local faster-whisper worker with a React transcript editor.
  • Before starting: An installed speech model, adequate local disk space and a recording made with participant permission; any optional hosted model needs a separately disclosed API key.
01
Python, FastAPI, SQLite, FFmpeg and a local faster-whisper worker with a React transcript editor
02
Data design: Store Meeting, Segment, SpeakerCorrection, Decision and CoverageMetric; talk time uses attributed audio intervals and overlapping/unknown speakers remain separate rather than forced into certainty.
03
Setup: An installed speech model, adequate local disk space and a recording made with participant permission; any optional hosted model needs a separately disclosed API key
engineering roadmap

Implementation plan

1

Phase 1

Pin the working slice and create its example input: Summarize an imported meeting with reviewed decisions, speaker contributions and explicitly limited talk-time observations. Confirm setup: An installed speech model, adequate local disk space and a recording made with participant permission; any optional hosted model needs a separately disclosed API key.

2

Phase 2

Implement persistence and write-time invariants before decorating the UI: Store Meeting, Segment, SpeakerCorrection, Decision and CoverageMetric; talk time uses attributed audio intervals and overlapping/unknown speakers remain separate rather than forced into certainty.

3

Phase 3

Connect the working view to real saved state. Keep original timing alongside corrected text. Speech recognition does not itself establish speaker identity; permit manual speaker labels. Show undecodable audio and uncertain passages without inventing words.

4

Phase 4

Expose the app-specific limits and recovery path in context: Start with retrospective notes and descriptive timing. Do not infer emotion, employee performance or intent from voices; participant permission and data deletion must cover derived metrics too.

5

Phase 5

Walk through this concrete acceptance case and preserve its exported evidence: Use a meeting with overlapping speech and a quiet participant; show attribution gaps and avoid labeling the person disengaged or assigning psychological sentiment. Finish the README and backup/restore instructions; report unfinished capabilities explicitly.

the pro prompt
download AGENTS.md
Build the following focused alternative to Read AI. This is a deliberately limited personal or small-team substitute, not parity with the paid service.

WORKING SLICE
Summarize an imported meeting with reviewed decisions, speaker contributions and explicitly limited talk-time observations.

SETUP AND ARCHITECTURE
Use Python, FastAPI, SQLite, FFmpeg and a local faster-whisper worker with a React transcript editor. Prerequisites: An installed speech model, adequate local disk space and a recording made with participant permission; any optional hosted model needs a separately disclosed API key. Before integrating anything, record actual versions and permissions, plus model files or provider limits only where used, in the README; make unavailable dependencies visible rather than simulating success.

DOMAIN MODEL AND INVARIANTS
Store Meeting, Segment, SpeakerCorrection, Decision and CoverageMetric; talk time uses attributed audio intervals and overlapping/unknown speakers remain separate rather than forced into certainty.

IMPLEMENTATION CONTRACT
Keep original timing alongside corrected text. Speech recognition does not itself establish speaker identity; permit manual speaker labels. Show undecodable audio and uncertain passages without inventing words. Provide an input/setup view, the main work view, and a review/export view appropriate to this workflow. Preserve the last saved state if a job or save fails. Include empty, loading, permission-denied, partial and retryable-error states. Log identifiers and error categories without secret values or unnecessary private content.

APP-SPECIFIC BOUNDARY AND RECOVERY
Start with retrospective notes and descriptive timing. Do not infer emotion, employee performance or intent from voices; participant permission and data deletion must cover derived metrics too.

ACCEPTANCE SCENARIO
Use a meeting with overlapping speech and a quiet participant; show attribution gaps and avoid labeling the person disengaged or assigning psychological sentiment. Also reopen the app after an interrupted operation, confirm the saved record/export remains inspectable, and document the recovery action. These are implementation acceptance requirements, not a claim that this guide has been tested.

DELIVERY
Deliver a runnable repository with migrations or project-format versioning, a non-sensitive example, environment/permission setup, the exact manual acceptance steps, and a backup/export-and-restore walkthrough. Implement the working slice before optional integrations; list any deferred paid-product capabilities honestly. Do not add capabilities outside the working slice just to resemble the original product.

PROJECT RULES FOR AGENTS.md
Keep the domain invariants above executable at the write boundary. Propose scope changes before adding providers or permissions. Never fabricate source evidence, publish results, identity matches or successful delivery. Preserve user originals and require an explicit confirmation for destructive changes or external publication.

$ open in your agent (prompt prefilled, you press enter), copy the prompt or copy or download AGENTS.md · generated from this app's build plan

prior art · use these instead of building, if you'd ratherwhisper.cppWidely used local Whisper inference implementation suitable for private transcription.↗
share on X ↗

Read AI pricing

planmonthlyannual (per mo)what you get
free$0/user$0/user5 meeting transcripts per month.No card required.
pro$19.75/user$15/userUnlimited meeting transcripts and storage; 100 file-upload credits per month.
enterprise$29.75/user$22.50/userUnlimited meeting transcripts and storage; 200 file-upload credits per month.
enterprise+$39.75/user$29.75/userMinimum 5 licences; unlimited meeting transcripts and storage; 300 file-upload credits per month.

free tier5 meeting transcripts per month.

billingmonthly + annual

hidden costsEnterprise+ requires at least 5 licences. Every member of a paid workspace needs a paid licence; Free users cannot join it, and file uploads remain credit-capped on every public paid tier.

pricing sources checked 2026-08-14 · pricing source ↗

Questions about Read AI

Can you build your own Read AI with AI?

Partly. The core loop is buildable, but a dependable replacement becomes a real weekend or multi-day project. For Read AI, capture meetings and turn them into transcripts, notes, and engagement summaries. The hard boundary is meeting-platform bots, email recaps, analytics, and team workspaces, plus capture reliability, integrations, and collaboration.

What does the Read AI build prompt cover?

The prompt starts with this scope: Summarize an imported meeting with reviewed decisions, speaker contributions and explicitly limited talk-time observations. Full-product capabilities excluded from the comparison include: meeting-platform bots, email recaps, analytics, and team workspaces; calendar auto-join; reliable speaker diarization. Follow the implementation plan and its prerequisites before expanding the build.

How do I use the prompt, AGENTS.md and agent skills?

Start with the Read AI prerequisites and stack, then copy the prompt into your coding agent. Save the project rules as AGENTS.md in the project root. Linked skills are optional packages or source instructions for specific tasks; review their current contents and install only those matching the chosen stack. A skill does not supply API credentials or verify the finished app.

How long will this Read AI project take?

The catalogue estimate is multi-day for the limited scope. Setup, integration approvals, debugging, deployment and ongoing maintenance can add time. This is an estimate, not a delivery guarantee.

What would I give up by replacing Read AI?

meeting-platform bots, email recaps, analytics, and team workspaces; calendar auto-join; reliable speaker diarization; mobile capture; team search and sharing. People still pay for Read AI because a meeting tool must capture every call without surprising anyone, then make the result searchable and shareable across a team. The recurring cost buys audio permissions, model updates, calendar APIs, storage, speaker correction, and sync, not just the visible interface.

What price is this guide comparing against?

The recorded Pro plan is $19.75/mo (monthly), checked 2026-07-31. Check the linked pricing source before buying. Building your own also has hosting, API and maintenance costs; the recorded amount is not a guaranteed saving.

What can I use instead of building Read AI?

The prior-art section lists whisper.cpp as starting points. Review their current scope, license and maintenance before adopting one.

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