Can I block AI notetakers without blocking real guests?

Not automatically — to the meeting platform a notetaker bot is just another external participant, so there is no single 'no bots' switch on most platforms. What you get instead is review: with a waiting room or lobby enabled, everyone from outside your organization queues for admission and you decide who comes in, which is where you catch a bot named 'Otter.ai Notetaker' or 'Fireflies Notetaker' before it hears anything. Some enterprise admin consoles can restrict external and anonymous join more aggressively, and a few platforms have started surfacing notetakers explicitly, but those controls sit with IT rather than with you as a host. Practically, admission review plus a stated ground rule at the top of the call covers most of it.

If I remove the bot, does the recording it already made go away?

Generally no. Removing a bot ends its capture from that moment, but whatever it recorded before you removed it usually already exists in the vendor's cloud, attached to the account of the person whose notetaker it was. You can't delete it yourself — only that person can, from their notetaker's dashboard. So if the content of the first few minutes matters, removing the bot isn't enough; ask the attendee to delete the meeting from their notetaker account, and confirm they did. This is also why admission controls beat removal: the waiting room stops the capture before it starts.

Is it rude to remove someone's notetaker from the call?

It's better to say something than to silently eject it, because the person usually has no idea it happened — most notetakers auto-join from the calendar without their involvement in that moment. A neutral line works: "I'm going to drop the notetaker for this one — happy to send notes after." That reframes it as a decision about the meeting rather than a judgment about them. Objecting to being recorded is entirely reasonable, and in two-party consent regions consent is a legal requirement rather than a courtesy, so you're on solid ground asking. The same norm runs in the other direction: if you're the one bringing a notetaker, say so at the start.

How do I stop AI notetakers from joining my meetings?

Q: How do I stop AI notetakers from joining my meetings?

Notetaker bots get in the same way any uninvited guest does — they sign into your meeting link as a participant — so the controls that gate guests are the controls that stop them. Turn on the waiting room or lobby so nothing joins without approval (Zoom's Waiting Room, Teams' lobby set to 'People in my organization', Google Meet's host management with Quick Access off), remove any bot already in the call from the participant list, and lock the meeting once everyone has arrived. That handles the symptom. The cause is almost always one attendee whose notetaker is set to auto-join every event on their calendar, so the durable fix is to ask that person to turn auto-join off, or to agree as a team on a single notetaker and one person who runs it. If what you object to is specifically the extra participant and the second copy of the conversation rather than note-taking itself, bot-free notetakers capture your own computer's audio instead and never appear in the participant list at all.

An AI notetaker bot is not doing anything exotic to get into your meeting. It signs into your meeting link as a participant — a headless client driving Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet the way a person’s laptop would — which is exactly why it shows up in the attendee list with a name like “Fireflies Notetaker.”

That’s the whole trick, and it’s also the whole solution: because a bot is just a guest, every control you already have for guests works on it. There is no separate anti-bot system to go find.

Get one out of a call that’s already running

Open the participant list, find the entry that isn’t a person, and remove it the same way you’d remove anyone else. Hosts and co-hosts can do this on every major platform.

Two things worth knowing before you do:

Removal stops future capture, not past capture. Whatever the bot heard before you removed it generally already sits in the vendor’s cloud on the account of whoever’s notetaker it was. If that matters, ask them to delete the meeting from their notetaker dashboard.
It may come straight back. If the bot is driven by a calendar integration, some will attempt to rejoin. Locking the meeting after you remove it closes that door for the rest of the call.

Stop it happening again

The universal lever is guest admission. If nothing external joins without approval, no bot joins without approval.

Zoom. Turn on Waiting Room so external participants queue until you admit them. Pair it with Lock Meeting once everyone has arrived, and consider requiring authenticated users to join, which blocks anonymous clients outright. Turning off “join before host” removes the window where a bot can arrive at an empty meeting.

Microsoft Teams. Open the meeting options and set Who can bypass the lobby to People in my organization or Only me — anonymous participants, which is what an external notetaker bot registers as, then land in the lobby for review. You can also disable Anonymous users can join a meeting at the org level, though that’s an admin setting.

Google Meet. Turn on Host management and switch off Quick access. Anyone not on the calendar invite — including a bot joining with the link — then has to knock and be let in. Meet also lets hosts restrict who can join to invited people only.

The names and menu locations move around between releases and plan tiers, and your admin may have locked some of these, but the concept is stable everywhere: make outsiders knock.

The fix that actually lasts

Admission controls are a filter you have to operate on every call. The root cause usually isn’t the platform at all — it’s one attendee whose notetaker is configured to auto-join every event on their calendar. They didn’t decide to bring it to your meeting; they decided it once, months ago, in a settings screen.

So the durable fixes are social, not technical:

Ask the person to turn off auto-join and switch to joining meetings manually. Every major notetaker has this setting, and it’s often a per-calendar or per-meeting-type toggle rather than all-or-nothing.
Agree on one notetaker per recurring meeting, run by one owner, with the notes shared afterward. Most bot pile-ups are three people’s tools all auto-joining the same standup.
Say the rule out loud at the top of sensitive calls — one sentence about no recording for this conversation does more than any setting, because it also covers the phone on the table that no lobby control can see.

What blocking bots does and doesn’t accomplish

Be clear with yourself about what you’ve achieved, because these get conflated:

Blocking bots is not a recording policy. It stops one convenient capture method. It does nothing about a local screen recorder, a phone, or a desktop app capturing the machine’s own audio. If your concern is confidentiality rather than an extra participant, you need a stated policy about recording and confidential material, not a lobby setting.
Blocking bots is not the same as blocking AI notes. Your platform’s own assistant — Zoom AI Companion, Teams intelligent recap, Gemini in Meet — never joins as a guest, so lobby controls don’t touch it. Those are governed by licensing and admin toggles instead.
It’s a real inconvenience for colleagues. Someone in back-to-back calls who leans on their notetaker is now taking notes by hand. That’s a fair trade if the meeting warrants it, and worth acknowledging when you make the call. It’s also the other side of a question plenty of people are asking from the opposite direction: can I use an AI notetaker if my company blocks bots?

If it’s the bot you object to, not the notes

For a lot of people, the objection is precise: not that a colleague wants to remember the meeting, but that a third-party identity joined the call, sat in the attendee list, and took its own copy of the conversation into someone else’s cloud.

That objection has a clean answer, and it’s a category of tool rather than a workaround. Bot-free notetakers don’t join the meeting at all. They run as a desktop app on one person’s machine and read the audio that computer is already playing, using the operating system’s own audio APIs — system audio capture, no bot, no plugin, no virtual audio device. Nothing appears in the participant list because nothing joined. Granola and Jamie work this way and produce a document after the call; Canary works this way and shows a live multi-resolution rolling summary during the call — now, the last 2 minutes, the last 5, the whole meeting — so you can catch up the instant your name is called.

Worth saying plainly: bot-free is a smaller footprint, not a quieter one. It removes the extra participant and the second copy of the conversation; it does not remove your obligation to tell people. If you’re going to be the person who removes other people’s bots, be the person who says what you’re running, too. And whichever side of this you’re on, recording rules vary by region — see one-party vs two-party consent and is it legal to record a meeting?.

If what you want is your own notes without adding a participant to anyone’s call, how to take meeting notes without a bot covers the options, and Canary vs Otter contrasts the bot-free approach with the bot-based default.

Bottom line

Notetaker bots join as guests, so guest controls stop them: waiting room or lobby on, remove and lock if one is already in, and set your platform to make outsiders knock. Then fix the cause rather than the symptom — the bot is usually one colleague’s calendar auto-join, and one conversation ends it permanently. And if your real objection is the extra participant rather than the note-taking, the answer isn’t to block notetakers, it’s to use one that never joins in the first place.