Answers

Does Otter.ai join the meeting as a bot?

By default, yes. Otter's OtterPilot joins your call as a visible participant that everyone can see. Otter does also offer botless recording from its desktop app and its Chrome extension, so it is a setting, not a law. Reline has no bot at all: it captures your microphone and the meeting's system audio on your own device, so there is nothing to switch off.

Short answer

By default, yes. Otter's OtterPilot joins your call as a visible participant that everyone can see. Otter does also offer botless recording from its desktop app and its Chrome extension, so it is a setting, not a law. Reline has no bot at all: it captures your microphone and the meeting's system audio on your own device, so there is nothing to switch off.

The details

  • 01On Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, Otter's assistant requests to join and is listed as a participant unless someone switches to its botless desktop or extension capture.
  • 02Reline never sends anything into the meeting — capture happens on your Mac, Windows, or Linux machine, the way a screen recording does.
  • 03You still get a speaker-separated transcript, and you can press play on any transcript line to hear that exact moment. Transcription and AI run securely in the cloud (Reline does not claim on-device AI).
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