notetakers

How to stop Otter from joining your meetings — the setting, the per-meeting switch, and getting it out of a live call

By Jack Jay · 17 September 2026 · 5 min read

Otter's Notetaker is the most common uninvited participant in business calls for a simple reason: Otter turns auto-join on when a calendar is connected, and most people connected a calendar once, years ago, to transcribe one meeting. Here is how to stop it — for the person whose account it is, and for the host who has never used Otter — with every setting name taken from Otter's help centre on 17 September 2026.

Whose Otter is it?

Look at the participant's name. Otter's bot joins under a name that includes Otter (it has been called OtterPilot and Otter.ai Notetaker in different years), and on most platforms the entry also shows, or a hover reveals, the email of the account that sent it. That person is the one whose settings have to change; nothing a host does on their own platform reaches into somebody else's Otter account. If it is yours, start with the next section. If it is somebody else's, remove it now (below) and send them this page.

If it is your account: stop it auto-joining

Two paths to the same switch.

From the Otter home page: open the Meetings tab, open AI Notetaker settings, and choose Meetings I manually select.

From account settings: Integrations → Meetings tab → the Default auto-join settings dropdown → Meetings I manually select.

Then two things Otter's own article tells you to do next, because the switch is not retroactive:

  1. Review your upcoming calendar events on the Meetings/Calendar tab and check that the Notetaker toggle is off on each one. Otter notes that "previous events that were manually toggled on/off will retain the setting" — an event you once switched on stays on.
  2. Mind the 30-minute rule. Otter states it needs an auto-join change "at least 30 minutes before" a meeting to take effect for that meeting. Turn it off five minutes before the call and it may join anyway; if it does, remove it as below.

With auto-join set to manual, you can still add the Notetaker to a single meeting from the calendar toggle or by pasting a meeting URL into Otter — which is the right way round: opt in per meeting, not opt out.

It is in the meeting right now

The host removes it like any other participant. Otter has no chat command; the participant list is the control.

  • Zoom: Participants → hover the Otter entry → ⋯ (More) → Remove → confirm.
  • Google Meet: People → the three dots next to the Otter entry → Remove from the call → confirm.
  • Microsoft Teams: Participants → ⋯ next to the Otter entry (or right-click) → Remove from meeting.

On Google Meet and Teams you can also just not admit it: it asks to join, and the request can be denied. On Zoom, with a waiting room on, the same is true.

Two things to know before you click. Removing the participant stops the recording from that point; it does not delete what Otter already captured, which is written into the owner's Otter account as a conversation. And if the owner has Otter's auto-share on, that partial transcript may already be in the inboxes of everyone on the calendar invite — Otter has a separate setting to turn auto-share off, and the owner should turn it off too.

You are the host and it is not your account

You cannot change the settings; you can control the door.

  • Zoom: keep the waiting room on, require authentication to join where the meeting allows it, and, as an admin, add Otter to the per-app block list (KB0083775). Blocking Otter's domain helps only partly, because the bot often joins on a participant's authenticated account rather than its own.
  • Google Meet: set meeting access so anyone not invited must ask to join, and deny the request. If Otter is on the calendar event as a guest, it is invited; remove it from the event.
  • Microsoft Teams: external bots are held in the lobby by default since mid-2026 (ExternalBotAccessMode = RequireApprovalWhenDetected). Leave the policy alone and do not admit it.

The admin-console detail for all three, and the honest account of what each platform still cannot do, is in How to block AI notetakers in Zoom, Google Meet and Teams.

What Otter keeps

Whatever it heard before it left, as a conversation in the owner's account — and, if auto-share was on, in the mailboxes of the invitees. There is no participant-side command that deletes it. If the call was sensitive, say so out loud, remove the bot, and ask the owner to delete the conversation and turn auto-share off; a written request is worth having.

The version that does not need a bot

Otter, Read, Fireflies and every other notetaker are the same design: a bot that joins as a participant, hears one mixed stream, and guesses who spoke from the platform's active-speaker signal — which is why it has to be admitted, why it lands in somebody else's account, and why it puts words in the wrong mouth when two people talk at once (the teardown).

On TeamMeet there is no bot in the room: each participant's browser transcribes its own microphone, the transcript never guesses, and the notes belong to the person who called the meeting. For calls that have to stay on Zoom or Meet, our own notetaker asks to join like the others do, and every transcript it brings back says how many lines it could not put a name on.

Sources

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