Read AI, the Seattle startup whose software measures engagement and sentiment of participants on video meetings, is taking a page out of ESPN’s “SportsCenter” playbook with its latest product.
Much the way a sports highlight reel distills a complete event into a more manageable and entertaining chunk of video, Read has launched “Read Highlights” to convert video of a work meeting to find the best parts.
By leveraging OpenAI’s GPT technology, Read Highlights can convert a 60-minute video recording into a 2-minute highlight reel. Large language models integrated with video identify the key moments from a meeting, analyzing not just the spoken words, but reaction from participants.
“What’s more boring than an hour-long meeting? A recording of an hour-long meeting,” David Shim, co-founder and CEO of Read, said in a news release on Wednesday.
Read Highlights replaces manual meeting notes and recaps with automated text summaries and video highlights. The company reasons that it’s the best way to share learnings across an entire organization with inviting everyone to a meeting.
Read was founded in 2021 by Shim, Elliott Waldron, and Rob Williams. The trio helped build location analytics startup Placed, which was acquired by Snap for more than $200 million in 2017.
Read raised a $10 million seed round as it rode tailwinds driven by the pandemic that caused massive adoption of video conferencing tools such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Its software uses AI, computer vision, and natural language processing tech to analyze voice and facial movements.
Shim told Startup that AI is having its “everywhere all at once” moment and that once the noise dies down a bit, the applications that stick around will change behaviors and create new habits that scale in terms of usage and revenue.
Along with Read Highlights, Read Summary uses GPT in combination with its visual annotations to create text summaries of meetings, which include action items, topics, and key questions.
Shim said Read has set weekly active user records in each of the last 13 weeks of 2023, and since the start of the year Read has seen a 597% increase in meetings measured on a weekly basis.
Read was named a Zoom Essential App in January. It released its first paid product last month.