Wave vs Read.ai
Read AI is meeting intelligence: summaries plus engagement metrics, sentiment, and speaker coaching, captured by a bot, a bot-free desktop app, or its mobile apps. Wave is conversation capture: it records video calls, phone calls, and in-person meetings, with or without a bot, and hands you speaker-labeled transcripts, AI summaries, and action items without scoring anyone.
Windows
ChromeRead AI and Wave overlap on the obvious job (an AI that captures your meeting and writes the notes) but they are optimized for different buyers. Read AI leans into analytics: engagement scores, talk-time balance, sentiment, and coaching reports layered on top of its meeting summaries. Wave leans into capture: recording every kind of conversation you actually have, wherever it happens.
How they capture audio
Read AI’s assistant joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet meetings as a bot on every plan, including Free. Its Windows and macOS apps can also record meetings on your computer with no bot, and its iPhone and Android apps record in-person conversations. Read AI does not list phone-call recording or a watch app.
Wave records five ways:
- In person, on your phone or watch. Press record on iPhone, Android, Apple Watch, or Wear OS and capture the room: interviews, client meetings, hallway conversations.
- Phone calls. The Phone Bridge records incoming and outgoing calls on iPhone and Android, both sides transcribed. It works on every plan; on Free, calls count toward the 30 minutes a month, and Wave Pro is unlimited.
- Calendar meeting bot. Connect Google Calendar or Outlook and a Wave bot auto-joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls, the same coverage as Read AI’s bot.
- System audio on the desktop. Wave for Mac and Windows captures mic and system audio directly, so nothing visible joins the call.
- Imports. Audio and video files, YouTube links, and podcasts get the same transcript and summary.
Notes vs analytics
Both tools produce transcripts and AI summaries. Read AI goes further into measurement: engagement and sentiment scores, talk-time breakdowns, coaching metrics. Some managers love that; plenty of participants find being scored in every meeting uncomfortable. Wave keeps the output focused on the conversation itself: a speaker-labeled transcript, a summary with decisions and action items, and a chat that answers questions from any past recording.
Pricing
Read AI Free covers 5 meeting transcripts and reports a month, meetings up to 1 hour. Pro is $15 a user per month billed yearly ($19.75 monthly), and Enterprise is $22.50 billed yearly. Wave is free for 30 minutes a month; Pro is $80 a year on the web or $15 a month in the app stores, with unlimited recording.
Where each tool wins
Pick Read AI if: you specifically want engagement analytics, sentiment scoring, and coaching reports across your team’s meetings.
Pick Wave if: you want every conversation captured (phone calls, in-person meetings, lectures, video calls with or without a bot) with clean notes and a searchable archive, minus the scoring. See all the ways to record with Wave.
The bottom line
Read AI is a meeting-analytics product with notes attached. Wave is a conversation-capture product with notes at the center, and it reaches phone calls and watches, which Read AI does not. Weighing more options? See the best Read.ai alternatives.
