Donna vs Read AI
Donna or Read AI? Pick Read AI if you want quantified meeting metrics — engagement, sentiment and talk-time scores across your calendar. Pick Donna if the meeting record must stay on your own infrastructure and you want analysis beyond summaries — verbatim receipts, tensions, position shifts, and the room read, all from a bot on your own server.
Read AI represents the quantitative wing of this market: dashboards, engagement scores, talk-time ratios. It is genuinely useful for spotting patterns across hundreds of meetings. Donna is the qualitative counterpart — one meeting, read closely, with the evidence attached — and she is designed so the sensitive output of that reading never leaves your infrastructure.
Side by side, structurally
| Axis | Read AI | Donna |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Read AI’s cloud (SaaS) | Your own server (privately hosted) |
| Where your recordings live | Stored and processed on Read AI’s servers | Your server’s disk and your own database — nothing on a vendor cloud |
| How it attends meetings | Bot joins Zoom, Google Meet and Teams calls | Joins Google Meet as a visible participant — on demand, or auto-joined from your calendar’s iCal feed |
| Meeting video capture | Yes, with recordings and highlights on paid tiers | Yes — screen video + audio, compressed server-side after the call |
| Transcription engine | Vendor-managed | Flocci Speech Recognition, with your key |
| Who owns the AI keys | Read AI | You — your Flocci Speech Recognition and Flocci Intelligence keys |
| What you get after the call | Summaries, action items, plus engagement, sentiment and speaker metrics | Meeting intelligence through one of six lenses: decisions with tradeoffs, exact-quote receipts, tensions, what nobody said, position shifts, the room read, and orders |
| Pricing model | Free tier limited by monthly transcripts; per-seat plans above it | No per-seat fee — credit-metered usage on the hosted service, or only your own infrastructure and API usage when deployed privately |
Where Read AI genuinely wins
- Quantified meeting analytics across a whole calendar — trends over time that a per-meeting narrative report does not produce.
- Coverage beyond meetings, extending the same analysis to email and messaging.
- Broad platform and app support, including mobile and a browser extension.
Where Donna wins
- A score is unarguable and unactionable. Donna gives you the quote instead — the objection that was answered with a subject change, the commitment that came with a soft deadline — which is what a review can actually interrogate.
- Scoring how individuals speak in meetings creates its own workplace-surveillance problem, and it does it on a vendor’s cloud. Donna analyses the meeting, not the employee, and stores the result on your own infrastructure.
- Sentiment inference is a model’s opinion about a tone of voice. The room read is built from observable behaviour — who deferred, who was talked over, who changed position — each anchored to a timestamp you can check.
The data question, since nobody else leads with it
Read AI: Stored and processed on Read AI’s servers. Donna: your server’s disk and your own database — nothing on a vendor cloud. For boards, client work, hiring, negotiations, and one-on-ones, that line is usually the whole decision.
What each one charges
| Read AI | Donna | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 5 meeting transcripts per month, 1-hour cap | One-time credit grant plus a monthly free allowance |
| Paid | Pro $15/user/month annual or $19.75 monthly; Enterprise $22.50 or $29.75; Enterprise+ $29.75 or $39.75 | Credit-metered usage — meetings attended, minutes transcribed, reports delivered. No seat licence. |
Read AI’s figures were read from their own pricing page on 29 July 2026; check it before you buy, because plans change without notice. Donna’s current credit costs live on your billing page at account.flocci.in.
Questions, answered straight
Does Donna score meetings or participants?
No. There are no engagement, sentiment or charisma scores. Every finding is a claim with a quote and a timestamp behind it, which is a deliberate design choice rather than a missing feature.
Can Donna show trends across many meetings like Read AI?
She carries open commitments forward and counts repeats — a blocker on its third appearance gets named — and Ask Donna queries the whole archive. What she does not produce is a metrics dashboard of speaking behaviour.
Which is safer for employee-related meetings?
Anything touching performance, grievances or compensation argues for keeping the record inside your own perimeter, which is Donna’s architecture. It is also worth asking whether scoring individuals in those meetings is something you want a vendor doing at all.
Put Donna in your next meeting
Access is open — sign in with your Google account and she’s in your dashboard in minutes. Rolling out to a whole team, or want a hand with the server setup? We’re glad to help.