Answers

Does Spinach join the call as a bot?

Yes, and only as a bot. Spinach joins from the calendar invite and you have to let it in from the waiting room, where it shows up as a meeting participant (on Google Meet it appears as @spinach.ai). Reline never joins: capture happens locally on your own computer.

Short answer

Yes, and only as a bot. Spinach joins from the calendar invite and you have to let it in from the waiting room, where it shows up as a meeting participant (on Google Meet it appears as @spinach.ai). Reline never joins: capture happens locally on your own computer.

The details

  • 01Spinach picks up the meeting link from your calendar, so ad hoc calls need extra steps, and the invite has to have more than one person on it.
  • 02On Google Meet you can pre-authorize @spinach.ai to skip the waiting room. That removes the admission prompt, not the participant.
  • 03To keep part of a conversation off the record you type pause in the meeting chat, then resume to start again, which is a visible action everyone in the call can read.
  • 04Spinach's help center says it is not currently optimized for in-person or conference-room meetings, and it documents no bot-free capture mode. Reline records mic and system audio on your Mac, Windows, or Linux machine, so ad hoc and in-person conversations work the same as scheduled calls, with transcription and summaries in the cloud.
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Last updated August 2026

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