Read AI launches an email-based ‘digital twin’ to help you with schedules and answers

Meeting note taker Read AI on Thursday launched an AI-powered email-based assistant called Ada, which helps users manage their schedules, answer questions based on a company’s knowledge base and respond to out-of-office emails.

The company calls Ada a “digital twin” that handles tasks for you 24 hours a day. Read AI said the assistant will be available to all users, and they can configure it by sending an email to “ada@read.ai” and writing “Get me Start.”

If you ask Ada to find a time to meet someone, the company will reply to the other person in the conversation with your availability. If the other person answers that he is not available at those times and would like a different time slot, Ada responds with new options. Although Ada can access your calendar through Read AI, the nature of those encounters with other people is not revealed.

Ada can also answer questions using a company’s knowledge base, topics discussed at your previous meetings, and public Internet searches. For example, you might ask, “Ada, can you provide an update on how we’re tracking Q1 goals?” to get information.

If someone else asks a question in a thread, Ada will prepare an answer for you and help you refine it before sending it to the other person. The startup said Ada does not release sensitive information without your consent.

Read AI’s VP of Product, Justin Farris, said the new feature doesn’t rely on MCPs (Model Context Protocols, a technical standard for connecting AI tools to external services), but instead builds a knowledge graph based on meeting data and connected services for more contextual answers. He added that over time, the assistant will also take proactive actions for you. For example, if you mentioned a follow-up item during a meeting, Ada will prompt you to provision it with contextual data after the meeting.

“The way I describe our solution is that when you hire a new employee, you train them. When you add Ada to your workflow and connect more services to give more context, it starts to evolve and do more tasks for you,” CEO David Shim told TechCrunch.

The company said that while Ada currently works via email, it will soon be available on Slack and Teams.

On the sidelines of Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Shim told TechCrunch that the company now has more than 5 million monthly active users and plans to grow that number to 10 million. He said the company sees 50,000 sign-ups every day and has a broader base of 100,000 users who consume Read AI’s content, such as meeting summaries, without creating an account.

For Read AI, the US remains the largest market with strong international growth. Although 60% of users are outside the US, revenue is about evenly distributed.

The company, which has raised more than $81 million in funding, is increasingly adding AI-powered tools to its suite. It was launched last year Find co-pilot for knowledge discovery for users, and last month added the ability to update customer service relations software, send custom emails from a meeting report, and stay up to date on topics based on on internal and web knowledge.

Other meeting minutes takers are also offering new tools to get more insights and actions from minutes. Last September, Granola added “recipes” in the form of repeatable prompts to surface knowledge from meeting data. Shaftwhich came out of stealth this week with a $6.5 million funding round, also connects to various tools such as Linear, Notion and CRMs, and aims to automate tasks.