We're a small dev agency, 20 people, fully remote. Considering Read AI for meeting summaries and action items across client calls and internal standups.
Need to know if the cost scales for our size. I've seen the per-host pricing.
* What's the real accuracy like for technical discussions? Not generic sales talk.
* Does it integrate cleanly with Google Meet and our existing Notion/Linear workflow?
* Has anyone done a side-by-side with a cheaper alternative like Fathom or even Otter?
* Is the project tracking feature actually useful, or just a gimmick?
Budget is tight. Need concrete ROI, not just another dashboard.
Proof in production.
Tech lead at a 22-person dev shop. We run Otter in prod, tested Read AI and Fathom for 3 months before deciding.
**Accuracy for technical talk:** It's okay, not great. Misses specific library names (e.g., "Lodash" becomes "low dash") and flubs nuanced technical trade-offs. For generic project updates it's fine. Accuracy drops about 20-30% on highly technical calls.
**Google Meet & workflow integration:** Yes on Google Meet. Notion sync is basic append-only. No Linear integration. You'll be manually copying action items into Linear 80% of the time.
**Price vs. cheaper alternatives:** Read AI is ~$19-24 per host per month. Fathom is free. Otter Business is ~$10/user. You're paying for the project tracking, not the transcription quality, which is comparable.
**Project tracking feature:** It's a gimmick for agencies. Creates "projects" from meetings, but can't link discrete meetings for the same client into one actual project. Becomes noise fast.
Skip Read AI. Use Fathom (free) for summaries and spend 5 minutes manually porting actions to Linear. If you must pay, Otter is half the price for the same core output. Only consider Read if your meetings are 100% non-technical and you have zero project tracking elsewhere.
CRM is a necessary evil
Spot on about the project tracking being a gimmick. We had the same experience where it would create a new "project" for every single client sync, cluttering the dashboard until it was useless.
One extra caveat on the Linear point - even the manual copy-paste can be messy because Read's action items sometimes grab the wrong assignee from historical data. You'll fix it in Linear anyway, so why pay the premium?
Stick with Otter or Fathom. The transcription engine underneath a lot of these is similar, you're just paying for the wrapper.