How to block AI notetakers from your meetings (Zoom, Teams, Meet)

To block AI notetakers from a meeting, control who is admitted at the door and who can install the app in the first place: enable a waiting room and admit manually, turn off host-side AI transcription, and — the durable fix — have your IT admin restrict the third-party apps and bot accounts allowed into your Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet tenant.

A notetaker bot is a headless participant that a colleague (or their calendar assistant) sends into your call to record and transcribe it. Because it connects like any other guest, it shows up in the participant list with a name like "Otter.ai", "Fireflies.ai Notetaker", or "Read.ai" — and unlike a human, it never leaves on its own. The question is common enough that Zoom now has a dedicated community thread for it.

University IT desks field the same question at scale. Rice University and the University of Illinois both publish knowledge-base articles walking staff and faculty through removing and blocking notetaker bots, and consumer-security vendor Bitdefender published a guide after a wave of reports that Otter kept joining meetings uninvited. The steps below consolidate what those sources recommend, per platform.

Zoom gives you two layers: what you, the host, can do in a single meeting, and what a Zoom admin can lock down for the whole account. Start host-side, because it works immediately and needs no admin.

• Turn on the Waiting Room so nothing joins automatically — Settings > Meeting > Security > Waiting Room. Every join request, human or bot, then waits for you to admit it, and you can simply not admit an unfamiliar "Notetaker".
• Admit participants manually and watch the list. If a bot slips in, hover its name in the Participants panel and choose Remove; removed participants cannot rejoin the same meeting by default.
• Disable the host-side AI: turn off Zoom AI Companion Meeting Summary (Settings > AI Companion) if you do not want Zoom itself transcribing.
• Lock the meeting once everyone expected has arrived — Participants > More > Lock Meeting — so no late bot can join at all.

The host controls above stop a bot in the room; the admin controls stop it from ever being installable or admissible. In the Zoom Web Portal under Admin > Advanced > App Marketplace, you can restrict which third-party apps (including Otter, Fireflies, and Read.ai) users may add, or switch to an allow-list so only approved apps can connect. Pair that with account-level Waiting Room and "only authenticated users can join" defaults so anonymous bot accounts are held at the door org-wide.

Teams frames this around meeting options and lobby policy. A notetaker bot invited by a guest usually arrives as an anonymous or external participant, so the strongest lever is refusing to auto-admit those categories.

• Open Meeting options (in the calendar invite or the in-meeting More menu) and set "Who can bypass the lobby" to "People in my organization" — external and anonymous joiners, including many bots, then land in the lobby instead of the call.
• Turn off "People dialing in can bypass the lobby" so no anonymous connection walks straight in.
• Remove a bot from the participant roster mid-meeting, and use "Don't allow attendees to unmute / manage what participants see" for extra control if a bot lingers.
• Turn off Teams' own auto-recording/transcription in Meeting options if you do not want Copilot or the built-in transcript running.

In the Teams admin center, Meeting policies let you set the default lobby behavior for the whole tenant — for example forcing everyone except in-org users into the lobby — so a permissive organizer cannot accidentally wave a bot through. You can also manage which apps are permitted via app permission and app setup policies, and restrict anonymous participants from joining meetings. Microsoft documents these under Meetings > Meeting policies and Teams apps > Permission policies in the admin center.

In Google Meet the host key is "Host management" plus "Quick access". With Host management on and Quick access off, anyone from outside your organization — which is how many bots arrive — must knock and be admitted, so an unexpected notetaker never joins on its own.

• Open Host controls (the shield/settings icon) and turn on Host management.
• Turn off Quick access so external and anonymous participants — the usual shape of a bot — have to request to join and wait for your admit.
• When a request appears from an unfamiliar "Notetaker" or a name you do not recognize, deny it; when a bot is already in, click its name and Remove from meeting.
• Leave Google's own "Take notes with Gemini" / recording off if you do not want built-in AI notes running.

In the Google Admin console you can govern this in two places. Under Apps > Google Workspace > Google Meet you can set safer default host-management and access behavior; and under Security > API controls > App access control (Manage third-party app access) you can restrict or block the third-party apps and OAuth-connected notetakers that request access to Meet and Calendar, moving unapproved ones to blocked or limited. Google also began rolling out a safeguarded guest admit flow in 2026 that routes higher-risk join requests — where third-party bots often land — into a separate screening queue.

This is the most frustrating part, and it is usually not a bug. Most notetaker bots join based on your calendar, not the meeting itself. If someone connected the tool to their calendar and gave it access to a recurring event, the bot re-requests entry for every future occurrence — so removing it once only clears today's instance. A widely-cited Microsoft Q&A thread describes exactly this: Otter refusing to stop joining meetings even after it was removed.

The durable fix lives at the source: whoever connected the notetaker has to disconnect it from their calendar or turn off auto-join for that meeting series, inside the notetaker's own settings. If that person is unresponsive or unknown, the org-wide admin controls above are the backstop — an app allow-list or lobby default stops the bot regardless of whose calendar invited it. Bitdefender's consumer guidance walks individual users through revoking Otter's calendar access and auto-join for exactly this reason.

Per-meeting toggles do not scale, and they depend on every host remembering to flip them. For an organization, the reliable layer is policy: control the app supply chain and the admission defaults centrally so individual behavior cannot reopen the hole. A practical, platform-agnostic checklist:

1. Inventory what is already connected. In each platform's admin center, list the third-party apps and OAuth grants users have authorized, and look for notetaker vendors — this is where the recurring joiners usually originate.
2. Switch from block-list to allow-list. Blocking today's named bots is whack-a-mole; permitting only reviewed apps stops tomorrow's too. Zoom (App Marketplace), Teams (app permission policies), and Google Workspace (App access control) all support this.
3. Set an admission default that survives careless hosts. A tenant-wide lobby/waiting-room policy and "authenticated users only" default mean anonymous bot accounts are held even when an organizer forgets.
4. Restrict who can grant calendar/OAuth access. Notetakers persist because they hold a calendar grant; limiting which users can authorize third-party apps to your calendar system shrinks the surface.
5. Publish a short internal policy. Tell staff which notetaker (if any) is approved and how to disclose recording, so the rules are enforced by norms as well as by console settings. University IT knowledge bases (Rice, U. Illinois) are good models for the tone.

If you are not the host, your options are narrower but real. You can ask the host to remove the bot and enable the lobby/waiting room; you can decline to speak until the recorder is acknowledged; and you can leave. On the platforms above, only the host or a co-host can eject a participant, so an ordinary attendee cannot unilaterally remove a bot another person invited. This is exactly why the durable answer is host and admin configuration, not attendee action.

One honest, non-pushy note to close on. If the reason you are here is that you want your own meeting notes but do not want to become the person who polices everyone else's bots, there is a different shape of tool: a notetaker that never sends a bot in the first place. Reline captures your microphone and system audio locally on your own computer, so nothing joins the call, nothing shows up in the participant list, and there is no bot for anyone to block — you get the transcript and a citation-backed summary without adding a participant to the room. It does not stop other people's bots (only host and admin controls do that), and you are still responsible for disclosing recording where the law requires it. But it removes your bot from the equation entirely.