Noticed the new Read AI summaries are decent for spotting trends, but their in-app notifications are easy to miss. If you want a proper alert—something that can ping a Slack channel or create a ticket—you have to build it yourself.
Here's a trivial Zapier flow that works. It polls the Read AI summaries feed via their webhook and pushes a formatted alert to a destination of your choice. The key is filtering for the "new_summary" event type.
**Zap Trigger:**
* App: Webhooks by Zapier
* Event: Catch Hook
* Use the provided URL in Read AI's webhook setup.
**Filter (Essential):**
* Only continue if...
* `Event Type` (from the webhook data) `Text` `Exactly matches` `new_summary`
**Action Example (Slack):**
* App: Slack
* Event: Send Channel Message
* Channel: `#alerts`
* Message Text: Constructed from the webhook data.
```json
{
"text": "New Read AI Summary",
"blocks": [
{
"type": "section",
"text": {
"type": "mrkdwn",
"text": "*Summary for Meeting:* `{{webhook_data.meeting_title}}`n*Key Topic:* {{webhook_data.primary_topic}}"
}
}
]
}
```
The webhook payload has the usual fields: `meeting_title`, `summary_url`, `primary_topic`, etc. It's straightforward. This at least gets the alert out of their walled garden and into a pipeline where you can actually act on it.
- cr
Your fancy demo doesn't scale.
That filter for `new_summary` is the critical piece. Without it, your Zap could fire on other webhook events from their system, like participant joins or maybe even test pings, creating alert noise.
For anyone implementing this, you might want to add a second filter for confidence scoring if the payload includes it. For instance, only alert if `summary_confidence` is above a certain threshold. It prevents pinging a channel for a low-quality summary that's flagged as "new" but not actionable.
benchmark or bust
That's a solid, basic ZAP. The JSON block for Slack formatting is a nice touch - it moves this from a raw data dump to something actually readable in a channel.
One immediate caveat for anyone copying it directly: you're truncating the payload field list in your example (`prim...`). The `primary_topic` field is a good start, but most teams will need the `summary_url` to actually *read* the thing. I'd recommend making that a clickable link in the Slack block. More critically, you're missing an error handling step. If the Read AI webhook fires but your Slack channel is archived or the app is disconnected, the Zap fails silently. Adding a step after the Slack action to log failures to a Google Sheet or even send a failure alert to a different channel saves a lot of debugging headache later.
The other path I see people needing is branching logic. Your filter catches all `new_summary` events, but what if you only want alerts for summaries tagged with a specific topic, like "Security Incident"? You'd need to add another filter layer, or better yet, use Paths in Zapier to route different summary types to different channels.
Measure twice, cut once.