Read AI’s ‘Digital Twin’ Manages Your Email & Schedule
▼ Summary
– Read AI launched an AI email assistant named Ada that manages schedules, answers questions using company knowledge, and replies to out-of-office emails.
– Ada acts as a “digital twin,” handling tasks like scheduling meetings by negotiating times via email without revealing sensitive calendar details.
– The assistant answers questions by accessing a company’s knowledge base, prior meeting topics, and public internet searches, and helps draft responses for user approval.
– Read AI’s product VP stated Ada builds a knowledge graph from meeting data for contextual answers and will proactively suggest follow-up actions based on meetings.
– The company has over 5 million monthly active users, with strong international growth, and plans to expand Ada’s availability to Slack and Teams soon.
A new AI assistant designed to manage your inbox and calendar has entered the market, promising to act as a personal digital twin that works around the clock. Read AI, known for its meeting transcription services, has launched Ada, an email-based assistant that handles scheduling, answers questions using company data, and even manages out-of-office replies. Users can activate the service simply by sending a message to a dedicated email address, making it accessible to anyone with an inbox.
This intelligent assistant goes beyond simple automation. When tasked with finding a meeting time, Ada communicates directly with other participants, negotiating availability and proposing new time slots if the initial suggestions don’t work. It pulls information from your calendar through Read AI but maintains privacy by not disclosing the details of your appointments to others. For answering questions, Ada taps into a combination of sources: a company’s internal knowledge base, discussions from your past meetings, and public internet searches. This allows it to provide contextual updates, such as progress toward quarterly goals, directly within an email thread.
A key feature is its collaborative approach to communication. If someone poses a question in an email chain, Ada drafts a response for your review and refinement before anything is sent, ensuring you retain control and no sensitive information is shared without your explicit approval. According to the company’s VP of Product, the system does not rely on common technical protocols for connecting AI tools. Instead, it builds a unique knowledge graph from meeting data and connected services, which allows for more nuanced and context-aware answers over time.
The vision for Ada is to become a proactive member of your team. The CEO likens integrating the assistant to training a new employee; as it gains more context from connected services, it begins to handle increasingly complex tasks independently. For example, if a follow-up action is mentioned during a meeting, Ada can later prompt you to schedule it with all the relevant context at hand.
Currently operating through email, Read AI plans to expand Ada’s availability to popular collaboration platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams in the near future. The company is experiencing significant growth, reporting over five million monthly active users with tens of thousands of new sign-ups daily. While the United States remains its largest market, a strong 60% of its user base is international, contributing to a revenue stream that is nearly evenly split between domestic and foreign sources.
This launch is part of Read AI’s broader strategy to enhance its product suite with artificial intelligence. The startup, which has secured more than $81 million in funding, recently introduced features for knowledge discovery and the ability to update customer relationship software directly from meeting summaries. They are not alone in innovating this space; competitors are also developing tools to derive actionable insights from meeting notes, using everything from repeatable prompt “recipes” to deep integrations with project management and CRM platforms.
(Source: TechCrunch)
