How to stop Fireflies from joining your meetings

That is worth knowing before a call rather than during one, because it turns a vague annoyance into a deadline you can actually act on.

Read the claim precisely, though, because it is narrower than it first sounds. It is a statement about transcript and notes creation. Fireflies does not document what happens to audio captured during those first minutes, and it does not say the bot recorded nothing. Treat the window as a reliable way to avoid a transcript existing, not as a guarantee that nothing was ever captured. If that distinction matters for your meeting, the honest answer is to keep the bot out rather than race it.

The bot appears as an ordinary participant. Per platform:

• Zoom. Open the participant list, click More next to Fireflies Notetaker, choose Remove.
• Google Meet. Open the participant list, click the three-dot menu next to Fireflies, select Remove from the call.
• Microsoft Teams. Open the participant list, click the ellipsis next to Fireflies, select Remove from meeting.

These are participant controls, which in practice means host or co-host. Fireflies’ documentation does not state whether a non-host can remove the notetaker, and it publishes no chat command for doing so. If you are not the host, treat asking the organizer as the reliable path rather than assuming a shortcut exists.

Turn it off entirely. Settings → Recording & Privacy → Recording, then toggle off Auto-record meetings. Per Fireflies, that stops the notetaker joining future meetings scheduled on your connected calendar.

Or keep it, on invitation only. From the homepage Upcoming button, open Calendar meeting settings under Fireflies Notetaker. The default covers every meeting with a web-conference link; switch it to “Only when I invite [email protected]” and it joins when you ask rather than by default. This is usually the setting people actually wanted.

Fireflies can reach a meeting through someone else entirely. A Fireflies user with a connected Google or Outlook calendar adds [email protected] to the invite, and the bot then attempts to join subject to that user’s settings and the meeting platform’s admission controls. The other attendees need no Fireflies account and were never asked.

Here is the part worth being straight about, because it is where most guides get vague. Every Fireflies setting described above governs your own notetaker. Your dashboard cannot cancel a bot that another person’s account scheduled, even when the meeting sits on your calendar. For somebody else’s Fred your real options are three:

• Remove it from the call, if you are the host or a co-host.
• Ask the person who invited it to cancel it. One click on their side.
• Remove [email protected] from the calendar invite, if it is an invite you have permission to edit.

For an organization, the durable control is not a Fireflies setting at all. Fireflies rules only ever govern the account they belong to. Blocking external attendees’ bots is a job for your meeting platform’s admission and tenant policies, which the general anti-bot guide covers.

Everything above manages a symptom. The bot exists because cloud notetakers need your meeting audio on their servers, and sending a synthetic participant into the call is how they collect it. Capture on the participant’s own device instead and the category evaporates: nothing joins, nothing shows in the participant list, no three-minute deadline to race.

In fairness, Fireflies now offers bot-free capture of its own, through a Google Meet SDK integration and a desktop app. Worth reading precisely: those remove the visible bot from the call, not the upload. Fireflies’ own SDK documentation describes meeting audio and video being shared with Fireflies and processed into its notebook. No bot in the participant list is a courtesy improvement, not an architectural one.

Minutes is the architectural version: it records device-side and transcribes locally with whisper.cpp, writing markdown to your own disk, so no bot joins and no audio is uploaded. To be exact about our own limits, conversation content leaves your machine when you send it somewhere: a summarizer you configured, or an AI agent you connect and ask to read your meetings, whose provider then receives what it reads. Out of the box neither is happening, and the complete list is on our security page. If you want the direct comparison, we keep one for Fireflies and Minutes.

One thing device-side capture does not change: tell people you are recording. The bot’s single virtue was announcing itself. Without it, consent is your job, which is where it belonged anyway. The legal detail is in recording consent law by state.