RIO DE JANEIRO–A growing provider of AI transcription, meeting-management and note-taking tools will now bundle two of the most-used AI services. Read announced Friday that its paid plans now include OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet.
The thought of an AI service bundling two other AI services may evoke the Onion parody “New Starbucks Opens In Rest Room Of Existing Starbucks” or the “Yo, dawg” meme (as in, “Yo, dawg, I heard that you like AI so I put AI in your AI”). But David Shim, co-founder and CEO of Seattle-based Read, said the company is following the lead of users of its core Search Copilot app.
“People were taking the output that we had from Search Copilot and then going in and saying, ‘hey, I would like to make this into a memo, I would like to make this into an email draft’’” he said in a conversation at Web Summit Rio. “They were just getting trained to go and click to ChatGPT, drop it into Claude. And so we figured, why not streamline the process?”
Shim said Read also followed the lead of users in choosing to bundle those two large language model AIs into its paid plans, which start at $15 a month when billed annually. “They’re the two most popular models,” he said.
“But the use cases are pretty different,” Shim added. “We’ve seen more people using Anthropic in certain cases for business use cases, for business writing, versus on the OpenAI side, it’s more of a general-market, massive deal where it can support different things.”
(Shim volunteered to have Read record and transcribe our conversation in the conference’s crowded, noisy speaker lounge; the resulting transcript looked accurate except for the notable exception of repeatedly spelling “Claude” as “Cloud,” but I also checked Read’s recorded audio.)
The CEO described this combination as a shortcut for Read users to get higher-level analyses of the data that Read already serves up by ingesting email, messages in work-chat apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams, and video-conferencing platforms like Google Meet or Zoom.
Read’s software already yields metrics like the number of filler words like “like” in a call, the words-per-minute rate of speakers (Shim hit 246 at one point) and the attention of everybody else on the call as sensed from analysis of the video. In a Zoom call that Shim ran to demo this, Read joined the call as a participant and posted a message in the chat reminding everybody of its activity.
Read CEO and co-founder David Shim speaks at Web Summit Rio, presumably with his company’s AI transcription capturing his words on a nearby computer. (Credit: Vaughn Ridley/Web Summit via Sportsfile)
Shim suggested one use case as taking Search Copilot’s output and then using either of those LLMs to generate an article from that. “You can take that information and then say, ‘hey, I’m going to drop it into Claude, or I’m going to drop it into ChatGPT,’” he said. “So it’s more like you’re dropping it into a word processor at that point.”
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I reminded Shim that PCMag’s policy bans AI-generated content and instead suggested something I’ve yet to see Apple, Google, or Microsoft offer with their own AI toolkits: the ability to read all the pitches I get for meetings and other events at CES and generate suggestions about which of them are worth my time at that logistically overwhelming event.
Shim said part of the point of this exercise is discovering how users employ these new tools.
“We want to see what people do with it,” he said. “I want to understand how people are using LLMs in more detail, and the more that they leverage this integration the more that we can build it into our existing workflow so that we can skip a step.”
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As for the upside for OpenAI and Anthropic, which each charge more than Read’s entry-level paid service costs ($20 a month at the former, $17 a month at the latter), Shim pointed to Read’s growth–40,000 new Read accounts created a day, of which 83% are still using the service actively 30 days later–as reason for them to want to let Read resell their product.
“It’s opening it up to a new market where people are able to try two different solutions,” he said. “Now it’s more streamlined, increasing the value of their actual product.”
Plus, he added, this can work to turn some people who might have stuck with the free tiers of GPT or Claude into premium users. And it may draw some customers who had not previously spent any real time on those platforms.
“We think it’s going to be more collaborative than it is competitive at the end of the day,” he said. “We’re not just going after the tech community, we’re going after the broader community.”
Disclosure: I moderated three panels at Web Summit Rio, with the organizers covering my airfare and lodging.
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