Read AI, a meeting note-taking company, on Thursday announced Ada, an AI-powered email-based assistant that helps users manage their schedules, answer questions based on a company’s knowledge base, and respond to out-of-office emails.
The company calls Ada a “digital twin” that handles tasks on your behalf 24 hours a day. Read AI says the assistant is now available to all users, and they can start setting it up by emailing ada@read.ai and writing “Get started.”
When you ask Ada to find a time to meet someone, Ada will reply to others in the thread with your availability. When someone replies that they’re not available that time and would like a different time slot, Ada responds with new options. Ada can access your calendar through Read AI, but the nature of your meetings with others will not be revealed.
Ada can also answer questions using the company’s knowledge base, topics discussed at previous meetings, and public Internet searches. For example, you could ask, “Ada, can you give me an update on how you’re tracking your goals for Q1?” To get information.
When others ask questions in the thread, Ada prepares answers and helps you refine them before sending them to others. The startup said Ada will not release sensitive information without your permission.
Justin Farris, vice president of products at Read AI, said the new feature does not rely on MCP (Model Context Protocol, a technical standard for connecting AI tools to external services) and instead builds a knowledge graph based on meeting data and connected services to get more contextual answers. He added that over time, the assistant will also start taking proactive actions on your behalf. For example, if you mention a follow-up item in a meeting, Ada will ask you to set it using contextual data after the meeting.
“The way we describe our solution is that when you bring a new employee on board, you train them. As you add Ada to your workflow, connect more services and provide more context, Ada starts to get stronger and handle more tasks,” CEO David Shim told TechCrunch.
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The company says Ada currently works with email, but will soon be available in Slack and Teams.
On the sidelines of Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Shim told TechCrunch that the company currently has more than 5 million monthly active users and plans to grow that number to 10 million. He said the company receives 50,000 sign-ups each day and has a broad user base of 100,000 people who consume Read AI’s content, such as meeting summaries, without creating an account.
For Read AI, the US remains the largest market with significant international growth. Although 60% of users are outside the US, revenue is split almost evenly.
The company, which has raised more than $81 million in funding, is adding more and more AI-powered tools to its suite. Last year, the company released Search Copilot for user knowledge discovery, and last month it updated its customer service relationship software with the ability to send custom emails from within meeting reports and stay up to date on topics based on internal and web knowledge.
Other meeting note takers are also offering new tools to extract more insights and actions from your meeting notes. Last September, Granola added “recipes” in the form of repeatable prompts for surfacing knowledge from meeting data. Quill, which emerged from stealth with a $6.5 million funding round this week, also connects to a variety of tools, including Linear, Notion, and CRM, and aims to automate tasks.
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