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There is a one-line fix that works even when you are not the host, and almost nobody knows it. Below: the immediate removal, the setting that stops Otter coming back (including the one that silently ignores you), and an honest account of what you can and cannot do about somebody else’s bot.
Type stop otter into the Zoom meeting chat. The Notetaker leaves.
The part that matters: any participant can do this. You do not need to be the host. You do not need an Otter account. It works in Google Meet and Microsoft Teams chat too. This is the only removal method that requires no permissions at all, which makes it the one to remember when the bot belongs to somebody else in the call.
One caveat worth knowing before you use it: if several Otter Notetakers are in the meeting, because more than one attendee brought one, stop otter removes all of them, not just the one you had in mind. To remove a single Notetaker, use the participant-list method below.
Host controls remove one specific bot rather than all of them:
This ejects the bot from the current meeting only. It does nothing about the next one, which is the next section.
In Otter, open Integrations → Meetings, open the Default auto-join settings dropdown, and choose “Meetings I manually select.”
The gotcha that sends people back to Google
Changing the default does not apply retroactively to calendar events you already customized. If you ever toggled auto-join on for a specific recurring meeting, that event keeps its own setting and Otter will keep joining it, no matter what the default now says. You have to open the calendar view in Otter and turn those events off individually.
Otter documents the behavior but publishes no figures on how often it bites. It is worth checking first when you believe you disabled Otter and then watch it walk into a call the following week.
The stronger version is to sever the supply line entirely: disconnect the Google or Microsoft calendar from Otter. A notetaker that cannot read your calendar cannot discover your meeting links, so there is nothing left to auto-join. If you only ever want Otter in meetings you deliberately choose, this is the setting that actually guarantees it.
This is the case every vendor help page skips, because the honest answer is awkward: you cannot reach into a colleague’s or client’s Otter account and turn their bot off. What you can do, roughly in order of how well it works:
And the limit worth stating plainly, because the pages that sell you a blocker will not: some notetakers no longer join as a separate participant at all. They capture through an attendee’s own authenticated session, so there is no bot in the participant list to remove. Admission controls do not reach that case. Disabling local recording may block tools that depend on Zoom’s own recording channel, which is worth doing, but Zoom cannot prevent genuinely out-of-band capture by a participant or a separate device in the room. That has always been true of meetings; AI just made it cheaper.
Every step above manages a symptom. The bot exists because cloud notetakers need your meeting’s audio on their servers, and joining the call as a synthetic participant is how they get it. Capture the audio on your own device instead and the entire category disappears: nothing joins, nothing appears in the participant list, nothing needs admitting, ejecting, or explaining to a client.
That is how Minutes works. It records device-side, transcribes locally with whisper.cpp, and writes markdown to your own disk. No bot, and no cloud either. Granola is also botless if you want the comparison, though it transcribes in the cloud, which is a different trade. If you are weighing Otter specifically, we keep an honest side-by-side.
One thing device-side capture does not change: tell people you are recording. The bot’s single virtue was announcing itself. Remove it and consent becomes your job, which is where it belonged in the first place. If you need the legal detail, see recording consent law by state.
Next step