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The most-searched questions about AI notetakers aren’t “which one is best” — they’re “how do I get this thing out of my call.” Fair. Here’s the complete removal guide for the common bots, the settings that stop them coming back, and the honest limits of what you can control when the bot belongs to someone else.
Bot notetakers join meetings the same way a person does: they read a connected calendar, find the meeting link, and dial in as a participant. That means there are exactly three levers — the calendar connection that feeds it links, the vendor setting that tells it to auto-join, and the meeting platform’s participant controls. Every fix below is one of those three.
Otter (OtterPilot / Otter Notetaker). To stop it joining everything: Otter settings → turn off auto-join for calendar events, or disconnect Google/Microsoft calendar entirely so it never sees links. To eject it from one live meeting: open the participant list in Zoom/Meet/Teams and remove it like any attendee. Both procedures are in Otter’s help center, linked below.
Fireflies (Fred).Same pattern: Fireflies settings → autojoin rules (change to invite-only or off, or disconnect the calendar), and remove the notetaker from the participant list mid-call. Fireflies’ own guide is linked below.
Anything else. The pattern generalizes: find the calendar connection and sever it, find the auto-join rule and turn it off. If a bot has no calendar access, it has no way to find your meetings.
This is the part vendors’ help pages soft-pedal: you cannot disable a colleague’s or client’s bot from your side. What you can do as host:
For organizations, the durable fix is policy plus platform controls: several platforms let admins restrict which apps and guest domains can join meetings at the tenant level.
Notice that every step above is managing a symptom. The bot exists because cloud notetakers need a way to get your meeting’s audio onto their servers, and joining the call as a fake participant is that way. Capture the audio on the participant’s own device instead, and the entire category of problem disappears — nothing joins the call, nothing shows up in the participant list, nothing needs admitting or ejecting.
That’s how Minutes works: it records device-side, transcribes locally with whisper.cpp, and writes markdown to your own disk — no bot and no cloud. (Granola is also botless, though it transcribes in the cloud — see our comparison.) One thing device-side capture does not change: tell people you’re recording. The bot’s one virtue was announcing itself; without it, consent is on you, where it belonged anyway.
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