Meeting notetakers capture what happens in calls.
AI assistants capture meetings, emails, messages, documents, and connected platforms, then synthesize context across your entire workflow.
That's the core difference between Fathom and Read AI, and it determines which tool is best for your work.
Most comparison articles treat these as interchangeable products with similar features. They’re not. Read AI is an AI assistant that builds a personal knowledge graph from all your interactions, with additional capabilities like enterprise search, coaching, and proactive recommendations. Fathom is a meeting notetaker built primarily for sales teams, optimized for call coaching and CRM integration.
The right choice depends on where your critical context actually lives.
Read AI is an AI meeting notetaker and assistant that ingests meetings, emails, messages, documents, cloud storage, and details from connected software platforms to build a personal knowledge graph of your work context. You can then search and chat with your work, and be reminded of next steps through proactive recommendations.
While Read AI supports many roles, sales teams are a useful example because deal context is often fragmented across calls, emails, internal messages, and shared documents, making the cost of missing information immediately visible.
Here's what that looks like for a sales team: It's Tuesday morning. You have a follow-up call with Acme Corp in 30 minutes. Instead of spending 15 minutes reviewing recordings, emails, and Teams or Slack threads across multiple systems, you open Search Copilot and ask: "What concerns has Acme raised about security?"
You get a synthesized answer from recent calls, emails, and messages all about Acme Corp: the CISO mentioned data residency on Thursday's call, procurement asked about SOC 2 certification in Friday's email, and your champion mentioned vendor risk in yesterday's Slack thread. You walk into the call with complete context, prepared to address concerns you'd otherwise have missed.
Likewise, when your sales rep finishes a discovery call, Read AI generates a transcript, analyzes conversation dynamics, flags objections raised during the call, and syncs notes to the CRM opportunity record.
Read AI's Topics feature automatically organizes interactions around themes like “Acme Corp,” "security requirements," or "implementation timeline," surfacing patterns across channels without manual tagging. When a prospect raises a concern in a meeting, mentions it again in an email, and your champion references it in Slack or Teams, Read AI connects those interactions into a coherent picture tied to the customer. You see the full pattern: this deal is stalling on trust and risk, not price.
Beyond search and synthesis, Read AI delivers insights when you need them and proactively through Monday Briefing, which surfaces key interactions and priorities at the start of each week. Speaker Coach provides real-time feedback on meeting presence. And the CRM integration automatically captures deal activity across channels, makes recommendations on when to move a deal forward, and keeps your pipeline accurate without manual data entry.
The value compounds over time. Every interaction is instantly added to your personal knowledge graph, informing future searches, chats, and recommendations. When a new prospect asks the same security question you handled last quarter, you can find that context in seconds.
The same pattern shows up outside the sales function. For a project manager coordinating a cross-functional launch, key decisions might surface in a sprint review, risk concerns emerge in email, and dependencies get clarified in Teams or Slack. Read AI connects those signals into a single thread, so teams don’t lose context as work moves across tools and stakeholders.
Read AI integrates with 20+ platforms, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Notion, Salesforce, and HubSpot. This cross-platform intelligence is unique to Read AI. Other tools capture meetings; Read AI connects intelligence where deals actually happen with its desktop, Android, and iPhone apps.
Read AI takes less than 5 minutes to set up the first time. Teams using Read AI see an average of 20% fewer meetings while saving 20 hours per month through meeting note-taking and Search Copilot.
Fathom is a meeting notetaker that records calls, generates summaries, and integrates with your CRM. Sales managers use it for call coaching: reviewing how representatives handle objections, analyzing talk-to-listen ratios, and identifying which messaging approaches resonate with prospects.
This approach works well when deals close in 1-3 conversations. Your sales rep finishes a discovery call, Fathom generates a transcript, analyzes conversation dynamics, flags objections raised during the call, and syncs notes to the CRM opportunity record. Your sales manager opens the recording, navigates to specific moments where prospects raised concerns, and prepares coaching feedback on positioning.
Fathom enhances what happens during and immediately after sales calls. It focuses on improving how sales representatives conduct meetings, helping them handle objections and advance opportunities through better conversations.
Fathom’s intelligence is tied to recorded meetings captured through its desktop application on Mac and Windows. It does not currently support phone calls, in-person conversations, or external meetings without a meeting link. That means context created outside scheduled virtual calls remains separate from Fathom’s analysis.
The limitation: Fathom doesn’t track what happens between calls or outside calls. Enterprise deals don’t happen in a single conversation. They unfold across dozens of interactions, including discovery calls, email threads with procurement, internal Slack conversations about deal strategy, and documents shared during the sales cycle. If critical deal context lives in email or messaging platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, Fathom won’t surface it.
Each person on your team captures their piece, but no one sees the full pattern. A trust concern raised quietly in email, reinforced in a Slack thread with your CSM, and never voiced explicitly on a call can stall a deal without showing up in call analytics. By the time the issue becomes visible, weeks have passed, forecasts are off, and sales leadership is reacting instead of steering.
That gap is hard to close retroactively. Fathom doesn’t support uploading external audio or video for analysis, so conversations recorded elsewhere, shared asynchronously, or captured before Fathom was in place remain outside its view.
Fathom works for teams whose deals follow a simpler pattern, where most context lives in recorded calls and email follow-up is light.
Pre-call preparation:
Read AI lets you ask "What concerns has this prospect raised?" and receive answers synthesized from calls, emails, messages, documents, and connected platforms simultaneously. You show up prepared with complete context from across your organization's communication channels, including previously raised objections and examples of responses that have successfully addressed such objections in the past.
Fathom involves reviewing previous call recordings. You see what participants said and what objections were raised, but only from scheduled meetings.
CRM accuracy and deal visibility:
Read AI's CRM integration keeps your pipeline current with all deal activity, not just calls. When your VP asks, "What's happening with this deal?" your CRM reflects the technical objection from the demo call, the pricing question from email, and the timeline concern from Slack.
Read AI also identifies deal risk patterns across channels: when prospects go quiet in calls but raise concerns in email, or appear enthusiastic in meetings but skeptical in other channels.
Fathom keeps your CRM current with call activity. Your opportunity record shows who was on calls, what was discussed, and what next steps were set.
Post-call admin:
Read AI automatically captures call notes, email summaries, and message context. Action items from the last call, email, and messaging conversation appear connected.
Fathom generates meeting summaries, extracts action items, and logs call details to your CRM.
Choose Read AI when:
Choose Fathom when:
Read AI is for teams who want standard AI notetaking services and also want to answer "What do we know about X?" across everything: meetings, emails, messages, documents, connected platforms. Fathom is for teams who are looking to answer "How did that meeting go?" and nothing else.
Ask yourself: Where does the information your team needs actually live?
If you regularly waste time hunting for context across platforms, or find yourself asking "Didn't we discuss this somewhere?" that's the problem Read AI solves.
Using both creates redundancy. Both tools record meetings and generate summaries, which means your team reviews two sets of call notes and maintains two CRM integrations for overlapping capabilities. If you need cross-channel intelligence, Read AI handles calls plus everything else.
Read AI is SOC 2 Type 2- and HIPAA-compliant, with GDPR support and custom data retention policies. Read AI doesn't train on customer data by default; you control what's captured, shared, and searchable. The platform supports custom privacy configurations for enterprise customers with specific compliance requirements.
Read AI offers a free tier that includes meeting note-taking, basic integrations, and access to Search Copilot. For teams evaluating options, this lets you test the core experience before committing. Other free meeting notetakers exist, but most capture only meetings. If your context spans meetings, emails, and messages, single-channel tools leave gaps that create more work downstream.
Read AI is SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA compliant, with custom data retention policies and opt-out by default, meaning Read AI doesn't train on customer data. Fathom is also SOC 2 Type 2- and HIPAA-compliant. The scope differs: Fathom accesses meeting platforms and CRM, while Read AI also integrates across email and messaging to capture a broader context.
Disclaimer: AI tools evolve quickly. Features described here reflect capabilities at time of writing. Verify current feature sets on each vendor's website before making decisions.
© 2025 Read AI, Inc.
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