Earkeep
The Read.ai alternative with no bot and no account
Last updated: · Reviewed quarterly
Read.ai is a measurement product: talk time, sentiment, engagement, a Read Score, a coach that counts your filler words. Earkeep measures nothing. It listens all day on your own device, transcribes locally, never joins a call, and never asks for anyone's calendar.
14-day full trial, no account required.
- No bot, no account, no calendar access
- Always on, with no Record button to remember
- €39 once, not $15 per user per month
The short answer
If you want meetings graded, Read.ai is the only tool here that does it: talk time, engagement, sentiment, a Read Score, a Speaker Coach, and speaker-attributed transcripts whenever its bot is in the call. Earkeep has no answer to any of that. If you want every conversation kept with no participant in anyone's call, audio transcribed on your own machine and never written to disk, and one payment instead of a per-seat bill, that is what Earkeep is.
Why people look for a Read.ai alternative
Nothing to invite, nothing to remove
Read.ai's default mode is a bot driven by a connected calendar: it joins Zoom, Teams and Google Meet as a participant, appears in the participant list, and can post a chat message naming who invited it. Many people searching for an alternative met it the other way round, in a meeting they never added it to.
That route is Read.ai's growth loop: reports auto-share with participants, and a recipient who signs in with Microsoft or Google to read one creates an account, with calendar access, in the same click. An administrator on r/sysadmin described it: "It all starts with an employee who joins an external meeting where Read AI is present... it creates a Read AI account for the user and then attaches itself to their meetings." The control that stops it organisation-wide, domain capture, sits on Enterprise+, the top tier. The ratings split accordingly: 4.0 on G2 across 44 reviews, 1.3 on Trustpilot across 107, two populations describing two experiences.
Earkeep has no bot, no server and no account, so nothing can turn up in anyone else's meeting and there is no sign-in through which to grant a calendar. Its own calendar reading is local and one-way.
Always listening, not waiting for a click
Writing Read.ai off as bot-only gets the product wrong. Its second mode is closer to Earkeep than anything else in this comparison: the desktop app captures microphone plus system audio on Windows and macOS, no participant appears, and it covers in-person conversations, huddles and dialer calls, with the mobile apps doing the same on the move.
It is also manual, and by Read.ai's own documentation the weaker mode: no video, no coaching, no deep-dive metrics, and, verbatim, "Read AI does not know who is speaking. It produces a transcript without speaker attribution." You press Record yourself, and the app sends reminders because people forget. The mode that avoids the bot gives up the differentiators people pay for; in Earkeep, local capture is the only path there is.
Earkeep listens from launch, and you decide afterwards which stretch of the day was the meeting, or let a calendar event title the span. Pausing it, or marking a meeting on the agenda as never-record, releases the microphone and the system-audio stream, so the recording indicator goes dark.
A record that stays yours, in files that outlive the app
Both Read.ai modes upload. Its Security & Privacy Overview: "data captured is stored encrypted at rest within the AWS us-east-1 datacenter in Northern Virginia USA", with EU and Canada regions through sales. Its privacy policy stores "your audio and video information... but in no case for longer than 2 years".
Earkeep transcribes in memory with Whisper or Parakeet and writes one plain .jsonl file per day into a folder you choose. Audio is never written to disk, so there is no retention policy to read, and grep keeps working if Earkeep is gone.
Read.ai has an MCP server too, so this is not one-sided. Theirs is remote, four tools, two of which write: dispatch a bot to a call, share a report. Earkeep's runs on loopback with two, both read-only, over your own files, alongside ten in-app ACP agents running as your own CLI.
Side by side
| Capability | Earkeep | Read.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Always-on capture | No start button, no stop | Calendar trigger or a Record press |
| Bot-free capture | No bot exists to join | None in desktop mode; the bot is the default for scheduled calls |
| Records a meeting you can't attend | Only what your device hears | The bot goes without you |
| Audio transcribed on your device | In memory, whisper.cpp or Parakeet | Cloud in every mode, AWS us-east-1 |
| Captures in-person meetings | Any app, in person too | Desktop and mobile mode do |
| Retroactive spans on a timeline | Define the meeting afterward | One report per call it recorded |
| AI summary and action items | No, but an agent you connect writes them from the transcript | Summary, topics, action items |
| Labels who said what | Not yet | In bot mode; its own docs say desktop mode has none |
| Keeps a recording you can replay | No audio is ever kept | Audio, video and highlight reels, Enterprise and above |
| Talk time, sentiment and coaching | Nothing like it | Read Score and Speaker Coach |
| Share with people who weren't there | No, but your agent files the notes where your team already reads | Reports auto-share with participants |
| Plain files you own | JSONL in your own folder, no account | A cloud store behind an account |
| Your own agents can read it | ACP agents plus MCP, over local files | MCP server, four tools, two of which write, over its cloud |
| CRM logging and 20+ integrations | None | Salesforce and HubSpot from Pro up |
| Windows and mobile apps | macOS only for now | Windows 10+, iOS and Android |
| Free tier that doesn't expire | 14 days free, then €39 once | Free forever, but 5 transcripts a month, one hour each |
| Pricing | €39 one time, one device | Free tier, then from $15/user/month annually |
| Platform | macOS 13+ | Web, Windows 10+, macOS 14+, iOS, Android |
Built inNo, but an agent you connect canPartlyNot available
What each one costs by year five
Switching takes an afternoon
- Install it, then let a day run. Earkeep listens as soon as it is running, so a first day of real meetings, online and in person, is captured before you configure anything. There is no import tool: your Read.ai reports and analytics stay there, so keep that account as long as you need them.
- Take Read.ai out of your calendar, whichever tool you end up using. Revoke the calendar permission it was granted: Google Account, then Data & privacy, then third-party apps and services, or myapplications.microsoft.com for a Microsoft work account. If an account was created for you, sign in and delete it. Worth doing either way.
- Mark yesterday, connect a calendar, then stop paying per seat. Drag a span across the timeline where a meeting was, or point Earkeep at Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook or any ICS URL and let events title their spans. Read.ai's cheapest paid tier is Pro at $19.75 per user per month, or $15 billed annually: $180 a year per person, indefinitely, with playback starting at Enterprise, $22.50. Earkeep is €39 once per device, after a 14-day trial needing no email and no account.
Which one fits you
Choose Earkeep if
You want the whole day kept, wherever it happened, and nothing leaving your machine.
- Your week has in-person 1:1s and at-desk huddles nobody put on a calendar
- No recorder of yours should appear in someone else's participant list
- The audio must not leave your device, let alone sit in a US region for up to two years
- You would rather pay €39 once than $180 per person every year
- Your own agents should read your meetings out of plain files
Choose Read.ai if
Read.ai does several things Earkeep has no answer to, and this page says so plainly.
- You want meetings measured: talk time, engagement, sentiment, the Read Score, Speaker Coach on filler words. Earkeep measures nothing
- You need to know who said what: its bot sits in the call, so transcripts are attributed by speaker. Earkeep has no diarisation
- You need to rewatch, not reread: audio, video and highlight reels, on Enterprise and above. Earkeep keeps no audio
- Calls have to land in the CRM: Salesforce and HubSpot sync from Pro up, plus 20 or so integrations. Earkeep has none
- You need Windows or a phone: Read.ai has both, and Earkeep is macOS 13+ only
If one of those is you, Read.ai's free tier is a reasonable place to start: this page is meant to help you pick the right tool, not just ours. Read.ai is built for sales teams, people managers and IT buyers who want the meeting graded as well as recorded. Earkeep is built for roles whose week is mostly conversations nobody scheduled: see Earkeep for engineering leads and Earkeep for product managers.
Other tools people weigh this against
Each of these gets the same treatment as this page: Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Fathom, tl;dv, MeetGeek, Avoma, or all sixteen side by side.
Frequently asked questions
Is Earkeep a good Read.ai alternative?
It is, if you want everything captured on your own device rather than every meeting measured in a cloud. Earkeep never joins a call, needs no account and no calendar permission, and costs €39 once. It does not grade the meeting, label who said what, keep replayable audio, log to a CRM, run on Windows, or send a bot to a call you cannot attend.
Why did Read.ai join my meeting?
Almost always because someone shared a Read.ai report with you and you signed in with Microsoft or Google to read it. That sign-in creates an account and grants calendar access in the same step, after which it joins your own meetings. To stop it, revoke the permission under Google Account, then Data & privacy, then third-party apps and services, or at myapplications.microsoft.com for a Microsoft work account; then sign in to the account that was created and delete it, since their support will not delete a third party's account on request. Administrators can block the app in the Zoom Marketplace or the Teams admin centre, and Read.ai's own organisation-wide control, domain capture, is Enterprise+ only.
Does Read.ai work without a bot?
Yes. Its desktop and mobile apps record microphone and system audio locally with no participant in the call, covering in-person meetings and huddles. Two caveats from its own documentation: you press Record yourself, and that mode produces no video, no coaching, no participant metrics and no speaker attribution. Either way the audio is processed in Read.ai's cloud.
Is Read.ai's free plan enough to skip paying for anything?
It depends how much you meet. The free plan is 5 meeting transcripts a month, one hour each, plus unlimited Ask Read search and the meeting coach; round-ups quoting 10 transcripts disagree with Read.ai's own pricing page. Earkeep caps neither the number of meetings nor their length, but its free period is a 14-day trial, not a permanent tier.
Is my audio ever sent to Read.ai's or Earkeep's servers?
Read.ai stores in the cloud in both modes: encrypted at rest in AWS us-east-1 in Northern Virginia, EU and Canada regions through sales, and a policy of keeping audio and video information "in no case for longer than 2 years". Earkeep transcribes in memory and never writes audio to disk or uploads it anywhere.
Keep the whole day, and keep it yours
14-day full trial, no account required.