notetakers

How to stop Fireflies (Fred) from joining your meetings — auto-join settings, the calendar invitee, and removing it mid-call

By Jack Jay · 17 September 2026 · 4 min read

Fireflies' bot is called Fred — it joins as Fireflies.ai Notetaker and is invited by email as fred@fireflies.ai — and it has two ways into a meeting: a Fireflies user's calendar with auto-join on, or a calendar invite that somebody added fred@fireflies.ai to, once, on a recurring event that now runs forever. The fix depends on which. Every setting name below is quoted from Fireflies' knowledge base as of 17 September 2026.

It is in the meeting right now

The host removes Fred like any participant. Fireflies documents the steps for each platform:

  • Zoom: open the participant list → click More next to Fireflies Notetaker → choose Remove.
  • Google Meet: open the participant list → click ⋮ next to Fireflies → select Remove from the call.
  • Microsoft Teams: open the participant list → click … next to Fireflies → select Remove from meeting.

The Fireflies user who sent it has a fourth way, from outside the meeting: on the Fireflies dashboard, the live meeting banner at the top has a Stop icon.

One rule worth knowing before you decide how fast to act: Fireflies states that if it is removed before 3 minutes, no transcript or notes will be created. After that, whatever it heard becomes a transcript in the sender's account.

It keeps joining: the auto-join setting

If a Fireflies user's calendar is connected, Fred joins according to a dropdown with four values. Fireflies' own wording:

  1. All meetings with web-conf link — the default: every calendar event that has a Zoom, Meet or Teams link.
  2. Only meetings that I own — events where the user is the host.
  3. Only meetings with teammates — events with the user's Fireflies teammates on them.
  4. Only when I invite fred@fireflies.ai — Fred joins only meetings the user deliberately adds the invitee to.

Where it lives, two paths:

  • Settings → Meeting Settings → Auto-join calendar meetings
  • Settings → Recording & Privacy → Recording → Auto-record meetings (which can also be toggled off entirely)

A third route from the dashboard: Upcoming → Calendar meeting settings under Fireflies Notetaker.

Choose Only when I invite fred@fireflies.ai, or turn auto-record off. Fireflies confirms: "once turned off, Fireflies will not attend or record the meeting."

It keeps joining: the invitee on the event

This is the cause that survives the setting above. If fred@fireflies.ai was added as a guest to a calendar event — a weekly standup, a client series — Fred is an invited participant, and the sender's auto-join dropdown is irrelevant. Open the event in Google Calendar or Outlook, look at the guest list for fred@fireflies.ai, remove it, and save the change for all events in the series, not just this one. Only the organiser of the event can do this; if that is not you, ask them. This is the step people skip, and it is why Fred is back the following week.

You are the host and you never used Fireflies

You control the door, not the settings.

  • Zoom: waiting room on; require authentication to join where possible; as an admin, add Fireflies to the per-app block list (KB0083775). Cornell's IT department blocks Fireflies at the instance level and still publishes extra steps, because bots often arrive on a participant's own authenticated account.
  • Google Meet: set access so anyone not invited must ask to join, and deny it — remembering that fred@fireflies.ai on the event is invited, and has to be removed from the event.
  • Microsoft Teams: external bots are held in the lobby by default since mid-2026 (ExternalBotAccessMode = RequireApprovalWhenDetected); do not admit it.

Admin-console detail for all three, and what each still cannot do, is in How to block AI notetakers in Zoom, Google Meet and Teams.

What Fireflies keeps

Under three minutes: nothing, per Fireflies. Over three minutes: a transcript and notes in the sender's account, which may be shared with the sender's team depending on their settings, and which only the sender can delete. If the meeting was sensitive, remove the bot early, say so on the call, and ask the sender in writing to delete the recording.

The design that makes all of this necessary

Fred, Otter and Read are the same machine: a bot that joins as a participant, hears one mixed audio stream, and guesses who spoke from the platform's active-speaker signal. That is why it has to be invited or admitted, why the notes land in somebody else's account, and why the transcript attributes a sentence to the wrong person whenever two people overlap — the teardown is here.

A meeting on TeamMeet has no bot to admit. Each participant's browser transcribes its own microphone, the transcript never guesses, and the notes belong to whoever called the meeting. For calls that stay on Zoom or Meet, our own notetaker asks to join like the others and says, on every transcript, how many lines it could not put a name on.

Sources

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