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Readouts: Summaries for your Email and Messaging

Updated

This page provides an overview of Readouts. If you're ready to enable Readouts, see How to get email and messaging reports (Readouts).

What are Readouts?

Readouts are a new type of report from Read that summarize your emails and chat messages, helping you stay organized and on top of your inbox. The currently supported apps are Gmail and Outlook for email, and Slack and Teams for messaging. In addition to providing summaries, Readouts identify the action items and key questions from your conversations, even suggesting answers where it can.

Readouts are generated automatically, based on the significant topics or workstreams that Read's AI models are able to detect from your communication. This will allow you to easily track progress along the major themes or projects that are most relevant to your work.

For reports based on your emails, there are three different ways in which Read will identify and create Readouts:

  • Read will look across your entire inbox and find the most common themes or topics, and create a report based around each
  • If you have multiple emails with people from a specific external domain name, this should also generate a report called "Correspondence with [externaldomain.com]"
  • If you regularly use labels in Gmail or custom folders in Outlook, Read will also generate a report for each label or folder with enough emails

For Slack and Teams Readouts, currently only the first type (topic reports) is available.

Contents of a Readout

Here is an example of what a Slack report looks like, although all Readout types contain the same elements:

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Starting from the top and moving down the page, you'll find:

  • Latest Update: This is a 1-3 sentence recap of the most recent and significant bits of information from this topic. This will update at most once per day (the same goes for the rest of the report).
  • Summary: This is a more comprehensive recap of what has been discussed over the past couple of weeks
  • Takeaways: This section includes the action items and key questions identified from your conversations about this topic, as well as any answers we can find to those questions. By default, these are sorted by relevance to you, but you can also sort them by time.
  • Timeline: This section includes all of the daily updates and takeaways, organized chronologically going back to the beginning of the report.

Then on the right side of the report, you'll see a panel with two different tabs:

  • Overview: This lists the number and type of sources (i.e. how many email threads, messages, or channels were used to generate this report), along with keywords associated with the report and the list of who contributed to it.
  • Sources: This is where you can dig further into the actual sources of information in the Readout.
    • By default, this tab shows the different email threads or messaging channels that contributed to the report, along with links to view them in the source app.
    • When you click on different aspects in the report, like an action item or key question, the Sources tab will show the relevant excerpt from the email or message behind that item, along with a link to view it in the source.

Privacy and Security

Read knows that emails and messages often contain very private and sensitive information, but rest assured that privacy and security has been a core principle at Read since day one. To learn more about Read's commitment to privacy and security, please see this overview and FAQ.

By default, Readouts are not shared with others and are completely private to your account. You can choose to share them with other Read users (or later un-share them) using the "Share" button at the top of the report. 

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