notetakers

How to stop Read AI from joining your meetings — and remove it when it is already in the call

By Jack Jay · 17 September 2026 · 6 min read

A participant called something like "Read.ai meeting notes" has just appeared in your call. Nobody remembers inviting it. Here is how to get it out in the next thirty seconds, how to stop it coming back, and what it has already kept — every step taken from Read's own help pages as they read on 17 September 2026, so that when Read moves a menu you know which line to distrust.

It is in the meeting right now

You have three options, and you do not need to be the host for the first one.

1. Type a command in the meeting chat. Read documents two, and any participant can use them:

  • Read Stop — Read leaves the meeting and still generates a report from what it captured so far.
  • Opt Out — Read leaves and, in Read's words, "no report will be created, and nothing will be saved."

If you want the recording gone, the second one is the one you type. It is also the only mechanism here that deletes what was already captured; removing the participant does not.

2. Remove it as a participant — the host, on any platform:

  • Google Meet: open the People panel, click the three dots next to the notetaker, choose Remove from the call, confirm.
  • Zoom: open Participants, hover the notetaker, click the three dots, choose Remove, confirm.
  • Microsoft Teams: open Participants, right-click (or click ⋯ on) the notetaker, choose Remove from meeting.

3. Refuse it at the door. Read asks to join like any guest. On Google Meet the host sees the request in the People panel and can choose deny entry; on Teams it waits in the lobby. Read's own statement for Meet and Teams is worth quoting: "If even one person says no, Read AI won't join." On Zoom, Read says only the host sees and answers its recording request dialog — decline it and the bot does not record.

One more Meet-specific case: if Read arrives through Google Meet's native recording integration rather than as a bot participant, a popup appears; clicking Cancel on it stops it joining.

It keeps coming back

Read joins because one person in the meeting — often the organiser, sometimes a guest — connected their calendar to Read and left auto-join on. The bot rides in on that person's calendar, which is why blocking a domain at the company level so often fails (why, in detail). The fix has to happen in that person's Read account. Send them this section.

Turn auto-join off, or narrow it. In Read: Account Settings → Meeting Recording → Auto-Join Preferences, then toggle Auto-join meetings off. If you want to keep it for some meetings, the same panel offers two narrowing controls:

  • Meeting scope: "all calendar events" or only "calendar events you are hosting".
  • Participant type: "any participants" or "internal meetings only" — where every invited participant shares your email domain, so external calls are never joined.

There is also a separate switch for whether Read may auto-join ad hoc (unscheduled) meetings. Turn it off too, or it will still appear in the calls that were never on the calendar.

Keep it out of one meeting. Open the Read AI Calendar, find the event, and toggle "Add Read?" off — Read's guidance is to do this at least a few minutes before the start. For a recurring meeting the toggle asks whether the change applies to all future instances or just this specific one.

Make it permanent. Delete the Read account. Read's help centre is explicit: once the account is deleted, "Read can no longer join meetings from that account." Disconnecting the calendar integration is the halfway house.

You are the host, you did not invite it, and it is not your account

Then the settings above are not yours to change, and you are down to what your platform lets a host do. The short version:

  • Zoom: waiting room on, and require authentication to join where the meeting allows it; Zoom's per-app allow/block list (KB0083775) can list Read specifically. There is still no "block all notetakers" switch.
  • Google Meet: set meeting access so that anyone not invited must ask to join, and deny the request — but note that a bot sitting on the calendar event as a guest is an invited guest, and has to be removed from the event by hand.
  • Microsoft Teams: since mid-2026 Teams detects external bots and holds them in the lobby by default (ExternalBotAccessMode = RequireApprovalWhenDetected); leave it there.

The long version, with the admin-console paths and the parts of each vendor's controls that still fall short, is in How to block AI notetakers in Zoom, Google Meet and Teams.

What Read has already kept

  • Removed as a participant, or told Read Stop: Read writes a report from whatever it captured up to that moment, into the account of the person who connected it. Ask them to delete it; you cannot.
  • Told Opt Out in the chat: nothing is saved and no report is created, per Read.
  • Denied at the door: nothing was captured.

If the meeting mattered — a client, a candidate, legal counsel in the room — the honest thing to do is say so on the call and use Opt Out. It is the only one of these that leaves nothing behind.

Why this keeps happening, and the version that does not

Read, Otter, Fireflies and the rest all work the same way: a bot joins as a participant, hears the call as one mixed stream, and guesses who said what from the platform's active-speaker signal. That architecture is why they have to be in the call at all, why they have to be invited or admitted, and why the transcript gets names wrong when two people talk at once — we took it apart in Why a meeting bot needs a whole browser to take notes.

A meeting held on TeamMeet has no bot in it. Each participant's own browser transcribes its own microphone, so the transcript never guesses, nobody has to be admitted, and there is no third-party account for the notes to end up in — they belong to the person who called the meeting, and any program that is present is listed to everyone by name. If your meetings have to stay on Zoom or Meet, the same honesty applies to our own notetaker: it asks to join like any other, every transcript it brings back says how many lines it could not put a name on, and your host can remove it the same way as above.

Sources

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