How to stop Otter, Read AI and Fireflies bots from joining your meetings

An AI notetaker is in your meeting and nobody in the room invited it. Somebody did, though, and the reason it keeps coming back is that the invitation is automatic. Otter, Fireflies and Read all connect to a calendar, scan it for meeting links, and join whatever they find. Once that connection exists, it outlives the meeting you first set it up for, the trial you forgot about, and sometimes the colleague who left the company.

Here is how to get the bot out of the meeting you are in right now, how to stop your own account sending one, how to cut the connection at the source, and what you can actually do when the bot belongs to someone else.

Get it out of the meeting you are in

Every vendor documents a way to eject its bot mid-call, and none of them require you to have an account.

Otter. Type stop otter in the meeting chat. Otter’s help page says all Notetakers are immediately removed, and that “any meeting participant, including those without an Otter account, can remove Notetaker”. The host or co-host can also remove it from the participant list in Zoom, and organisers and presenters can in Teams.

Read AI. Type Read stop in the chat to remove it while still letting it generate a report, or opt out to remove it and delete the meeting data. Or open Participants, find the notetaker, and choose remove: right-click in Teams, the three dots in Meet and Zoom.

Fireflies. Remove fred@fireflies.ai from the participant list the same way, and from the calendar invite for any future occurrence of the meeting.

That handles the next forty minutes. It does nothing about tomorrow.

Stop your own account sending it

If the bot is yours, the fix is one setting, and each vendor buries it somewhere slightly different.

Otter. Meetings tab, then AI Notetaker settings, then choose Meetings I manually select. Otter notes that events you previously toggled on or off individually keep that setting, so check the calendar view for anything already scheduled.

Fireflies. Settings, then Recording & Privacy, and turn off Auto-record meetings. Fireflies’ knowledge base also describes an auto-join setting with a Don’t join any meeting option.

Read AI. Read’s calendar view has an Add Read? toggle per meeting. Turn it off a few minutes before the start so Read has time to sync; Read’s help says it may otherwise join anyway.

Cut the calendar access at the source

Settings inside the notetaker are only as durable as your memory of them. The connection that lets the bot see your meetings in the first place is a third-party app permission on your Google, Microsoft or Zoom account, and revoking it there ends the auto-joining for good.

• Google: myaccount.google.com, Security, third-party access, remove the app.
• Microsoft: account.microsoft.com, Privacy, apps and services, remove the app.
• Zoom: zoom.us profile settings, Apps, Manage, remove the app.
• Browser extensions: Otter’s Chrome and Edge extensions can detect meeting links in the browser and join from there, independent of the calendar. Uninstall them.

Deleting the notetaker account entirely is the final option, and the only one that also ends the vendor’s copy of past meetings on their terms.

When the bot belongs to someone else

This is the case that generates most of the Zoom community threads, and there is no clean answer. If a colleague’s or a client’s calendar invited the bot, their account keeps inviting it until they change the setting above, and nothing in your own account can reach it.

What a host can do in the meeting:

• Remove it from Participants. Works, every time, for that meeting.
• Waiting room. The bot arrives as a participant and sits in the waiting room until you decide. Effective, and the reason most people do not do it is they do not want a waiting room on every meeting.
• Ask the person. Their calendar sent it. Most people had forgotten it was connected.

What Zoom admins can do is narrower than the settings suggest. In a long Zoom community thread on exactly this question, admins report that “only authenticated users can join” and domain blocking did not stop the bots, because the bots join through a participant’s own authenticated account rather than from a separate domain. Restricting app permissions in the Zoom Marketplace (Admin App Management, Permissions) stops internal users’ apps, but as one reply puts it, “external participants will still be able to utilize Otter.ai”. For Zoom’s own AI Companion, a Zoom community manager’s answer is the host clicking the Zoom AI icon and choosing Stop Zoom AI features.

In Teams, the organiser controls Microsoft’s own Copilot through the meeting options (“Copilot and other AI”), and can restrict who may record and transcribe. Third-party bots are participants and are handled as above.

Why this keeps happening

The bot model is what makes all of this necessary. A notetaker that joins the call as a participant has to be invited, so it hooks itself to a calendar; it has to be visible, so it changes the room; and it has to send the audio somewhere, so the meeting ends up on a server that none of the other participants chose.

The alternative is a tool that records on the user’s own device and never joins anything. That solves the uninvited-guest problem completely. It does not by itself solve the where-does-the-audio-go problem, because most device-capture tools upload it for transcription, and the sub-category that keeps everything on the machine is smaller. We map the difference in AI note takers that don’t join your meeting.

None of it changes the consent question. Removing the bot removes the vendor from your meeting; if you then take notes with anything else, the people in the room still deserve to be told. The rules by state are in two-party consent states, and what the lists get wrong.

Where Private Notetaker fits

Private Notetaker never appears in a meeting, so there is nothing for anyone to remove and no calendar for it to hook. It captures the call audio on your own computer, transcribes it there, and writes the notes there. If you are the person whose bot has been annoying colleagues, it is the version of the same job that does not put a guest in the room, and it is the version that keeps the meeting off any server as well.

If you were the one removing the bot, the side by side with Otter and the side by side with Read AI show what you give up and what you get. The honest gaps: it is English only, there is no shared workspace, and it is a single desktop app rather than a team platform.

Removal and auto-join steps are from Otter’s, Fireflies’ and Read AI’s own help centres, a Bitdefender guide to Otter’s calendar integration, and a Zoom community thread on blocking third-party notetakers, all checked 16 September 2026. Vendors move their settings; if a path above has changed, the setting name is usually the same.