Why Otter AI keeps joining meetings and how to stop it

Otter AI joins your meetings because someone’s Otter account is connected to a calendar with auto-join turned on. If it is yours, open Integrations > Meetings > Default auto-join settings and choose “Meetings I manually select”, or disconnect the calendar. If it is someone else’s, anyone in the call can type “stop otter” in the meeting chat.

Otter Notetaker is a bot that joins Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls as a visible guest participant. It does not find your meeting on its own. Someone connected a Google or Microsoft calendar to an Otter account, Otter synced the events, and the account’s auto-join setting decides which of those events the bot attends. The calendar does not even have to use the same email address as the Otter account, which is one reason people are surprised by whose bot shows up.

Otter offers up to five auto-join defaults, depending on the account (the internal and external options only appear in a workspace with a business domain). All but the last send the bot without any per-meeting decision; only “Meetings I manually select” requires you to switch a meeting on yourself:

Three details explain most of the “it keeps coming back” complaints. First, a setting changed on a single event, or on a recurring series, overrides the default, and Otter says those manual choices are kept when you change the default later. Second, switching auto-join on for one occurrence of a recurring meeting switches it on for the whole series. Third, the Otter Chrome extension offers an “Enable AI Notetaker to auto-join all other meetings” option, so a single click there can turn on auto-join for every scheduled Zoom and Meet call. Carleton College’s IT team also points out that a calendar connected once keeps working after the person stops opening Otter.

The bot’s name tells you. Otter documents the display name as the account owner’s first name followed by “Notetaker (Otter.ai)”, for example “Sam’s Notetaker (Otter.ai)”. In a company workspace with Otter’s deduplication turned on, it can show the workspace name instead. That gives you the right fix:

If the bot carries your name, you can stop it in about a minute without losing anything. On the web:

1. Sign in at otter.ai.
2. Open Integrations, then the Meetings tab.
3. Click the “Default auto-join settings” drop-down and choose “Meetings I manually select”. (The same setting is reachable from the homepage: Meetings tab > AI Notetaker settings.)
4. Open the homepage calendar and go through your upcoming events. Any event or recurring series you switched on by hand keeps its setting, so switch each one off. Otter shows which events you toggled individually.

Tap Account > Account Settings > Meeting settings > Auto-join meetings and choose Manual. Then check the Calendar tab for events you switched on individually, for the same reason as on the web.

The extension’s “Enable AI Notetaker to auto-join all other meetings” option writes to the same auto-join setting, so the steps above undo it. If you no longer use the extension, removing it from Chrome is the tidy follow-up that Carleton College’s IT team recommends.

Turning off auto-join keeps your calendar synced so you can still send the bot on purpose. If you want Otter to stop seeing your meetings at all, disconnect the calendar:

1. Sign in at otter.ai and click Integrations in the left menu.
2. Scroll to the calendar section.
3. Click Disconnect next to each Google or Microsoft calendar.

Otter says the disconnect is immediate: previously synced future events are removed and no new events sync, while past events and their recorded conversations stay in your account. On the mobile app the path is Account > Account Settings > Setup > Connect calendars, then the X next to the calendar and Remove connection. An Apple Calendar synced from the iOS app can only be disconnected in the iOS app.

You cannot change another person’s Otter settings, but you are not stuck. Otter built a removal path for exactly this case:

1. Type “stop otter” in the Zoom, Google Meet or Teams meeting chat. Otter says this removes every Otter Notetaker in the meeting at once.
2. Or open the Notetaker’s link in the meeting chat (shown when the owner has chat messages on), click Stop Notetaker and confirm with “Yes, turn it off”.
3. Or, if you are the host, remove the Notetaker from the participant list like any other attendee.
4. Then fix the next occurrence: tell the person named on the bot that it joined, and ask them to switch that event or series off in their Otter homepage calendar, or to move to “Meetings I manually select”. For a recurring meeting, one switch covers the whole series.

Removing the bot only clears today’s meeting. Without step 4, a recurring series will bring it back next week, which is the pattern behind most “Otter keeps joining” threads.

Otter states that its Notetaker joins as a guest and cannot sign in to an account belonging to your organization to get around guest restrictions. So the controls that hold back unknown guests can help with the bot too: a waiting room or lobby keeps it out until a person admits it. Setting names are quoted from each platform’s English interface:

The full per-platform walkthrough, including admin-level app restrictions for every notetaker bot (not just Otter), is in our guide to blocking AI notetakers.

What you can do depends on whether your company pays for an Otter workspace. If it does, Otter’s admin controls are the cleanest lever. These are Enterprise features, and several are switched on by Otter rather than in the UI:

• Lock auto-join for everyone: Manage Workspace > Settings, click Edit next to “Auto-join setting for workspace members”, pick a default such as “Meetings the member manually selects”, and turn on “Lock default auto-join setting” so members cannot change it.
• Turn the Notetaker off per person: Manage Workspace > Members, Notetaker column. Members switched off cannot auto-join or paste a meeting link to send the bot. Otter says this per-member control is enabled for the workspace by your Otter account manager.
• Block by meeting title: keywords such as “DNR” or “Confidential” stop the Notetaker from auto-joining any meeting whose title contains them. Otter says this is set up through Otter Support or your account manager, not yet in the UI, and only covers Notetakers from your own workspace.
• Host override: ask Otter to make the meeting host’s Notetaker the only one from your workspace that joins, so attendees’ bots do not stack up.

If your company does not use Otter, you cannot reach individual Otter accounts, so control the meeting side instead: restrict third-party apps in the Zoom App Marketplace, Google Workspace app access control or Microsoft Entra, and set organization-wide lobby or waiting-room defaults so guest bots wait for admission.

Deleting the account is permanent, so Otter itself suggests a short checklist first: turn off Notetaker auto-join, disconnect your calendar, export any conversations you want to keep, and cancel a paid subscription (it is forfeited on deletion). Then:

1. Go to Account Settings > General and scroll to the bottom.
2. Click Delete account and verify with your password, or with Google, Microsoft or Apple if you signed up that way.
3. Read the confirmation and click Delete account.

Conversations you shared with others become inaccessible to them too, and Otter notes it keeps limited details such as your email for accounting. If “Delete account” is missing, you are probably in a workspace with two or more members: a member has to ask the workspace owner to remove or delete them, and an owner has to remove every other member first. Deleting the mobile app does not delete the account, and it does not cancel a subscription bought through the App Store or Google Play.

If you mostly take notes for yourself, there is a version of this with no bot to manage. Reline captures your microphone and the meeting audio on your own device, from the desktop app on Mac, Windows and Linux (beta) or in the browser. Nothing joins the call or appears in the participant list. Transcription, AI summaries and storage happen in the cloud.

To be fair to Otter: its help center says the Otter Desktop app can also record without the Notetaker joining, so dropping the bot does not force you to leave Otter. Neither tool removes a bot someone else sends; only the steps above do that. And either way, you still tell people you are recording where the law requires it.

• Otter help center (all read 20 October 2026): “Stop Otter Notetaker from automatically joining your meetings”, “Choose which meetings Otter Notetaker records”, “Manage your Otter Notetaker settings”, “Manage recurring meetings”, “Otter Chrome extension”.
• Otter help center: “Disconnect your calendar (Google, Microsoft, Apple Calendar)”, “Remove Otter Notetaker from your meeting (Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams)”, “Otter Notetaker Overview”.
• Otter help center: “Recording Permissions with Otter”, “Manage Otter Notetaker for your workspace”, “Block Otter Notetaker from joining meetings based on meeting title keywords”, “Prioritize Meeting Host’s Notetaker (Deduplication)”, “Delete your Otter account”.
• Google Account Help: “Manage links between your Google Account & apps from other developers” (support.google.com/accounts/answer/13533235).
• Carleton College, “An Uninvited Guest: What you should know about Otter AI’s Notetaker” (26 March 2026).