Wave vs Read.ai
Read.ai is meeting intelligence: a bot joins your video calls and produces summaries plus engagement metrics, sentiment, and speaker coaching. 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.
Read.ai and Wave overlap on the obvious job — an AI that attends 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, plus a “copilot everywhere” push into email and messaging summaries. Wave leans into capture: recording every kind of conversation you actually have, wherever it happens.
How they capture audio
Read.ai captures meetings the way most meeting-intelligence tools do: a bot joins your scheduled video call and processes what the platform sends it. If the conversation is not a video meeting with a join link, there is nothing for Read.ai to attend. Its mobile experience is primarily a viewer for notes, not a recorder.
Wave records four ways:
- In-person, on your phone or Apple Watch. Press record on iPhone, Android, or your wrist and capture the room — interviews, client meetings, hallway conversations.
- Phone calls. The built-in Phone Bridge records incoming and outgoing iPhone calls, both sides transcribed.
- Calendar meeting bot.Connect Google Calendar or Outlook and a Wave bot auto-joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls — same coverage as Read.ai’s bot.
- System audio on the desktop. Wave Desktop for Mac and Windows captures mic + system audio directly, so nothing visible joins the call.
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, and some teams disable it for exactly that reason. 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.
Where each tool wins
Pick Read.ai if:your meetings are all scheduled video calls and 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 surveillance-adjacent 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. If your conversations extend past scheduled video calls, Wave covers ground Read.ai cannot reach. Weighing more options? See the best Read.ai alternatives.
Common questions about Wave vs Read.ai
Does Read.ai work for in-person meetings?
No. Read.ai captures meetings through a bot that joins scheduled video calls, so an in-person conversation has nothing for it to join. Wave records in-person meetings directly — press record on your iPhone, Android phone, or Apple Watch and it captures the room with speaker-labeled transcription.
Can Read.ai record phone calls?
No. Read.ai is built around video-meeting bots and cannot capture a regular phone call. Wave includes a Phone Bridge that records incoming and outgoing iPhone calls with both sides transcribed and summarized.
Can Read.ai record a meeting without a bot joining?
No — Read.ai’s capture path is its meeting bot. Wave gives you both options: send the calendar bot, or use Wave Desktop on Mac and Windows to capture mic + system audio directly so nothing visible joins the call.
Does Wave score engagement and sentiment like Read.ai?
No, by design. Wave focuses on the conversation itself — speaker-labeled transcript, AI summary, action items, and a chat you can ask about any recording — without scoring participants. If your team specifically wants meeting analytics and coaching metrics, that is Read.ai’s specialty.
