To stop an AI notetaker from joining your meeting, block the bot at the door, then revoke the calendar grant that keeps sending it.

Every guide on how to stop an AI notetaker from joining your meeting tells you where the remove button is. That treats the symptom. The bot is there because a calendar integration invited it, it will return for every future event with a video link, and the durable fix is one revoked permission, not a hundred removals.

Why the bot keeps showing up

An AI notetaker bot joins your meetings because one participant connected their calendar to the notetaker vendor and left auto-join on. Otter’s OtterPilot, Read AI, and Fireflies all work the same way: the user grants the vendor OAuth access to their Google or Microsoft calendar, the vendor scans every event for a Zoom, Teams, or Meet link, and a bot participant dials in at the start time.

Two consequences follow from that design:

• Removing the bot from today’s call changes nothing about tomorrow’s. The calendar grant is still live and the vendor still sees every event.
• The person who caused it often does not know. Auto-join defaults to broad settings, and plenty of users connected their calendar months ago during a trial and forgot.

So the job splits in two: eject the bot now, then find whose calendar sent it and shut off the source.

TWO FIXES, ONE OF THEM STICKS

Symptom fix:   waiting room -> remove bot -> it returns
               -> remove bot -> it returns -> forever

Source fix:    find whose calendar sent it
               -> revoke one OAuth grant -> done

Zoom: waiting room first, then remove without rejoin

The fastest block in Zoom is the Waiting Room: bots land there like any uninvited participant, and you simply never admit them. Turn it on per meeting under Security, or account-wide in Settings under Meeting Security.

If a bot is already inside:

• Open Participants, hover the bot (it usually names itself, “Otter.ai Notetaker”, “Read.ai meeting notes”, “Fireflies.ai Notetaker”), choose Remove.
• Check that Allow removed participants to rejoin is off in your meeting settings. It is off by default; if someone enabled it, the bot can dial straight back in.
• For recurring meetings, also enable Only authenticated users can join. Most notetaker bots join as guests and fail that check.

Zoom’s own AI Companion is a separate problem. It is not a bot participant, it is a host-side feature, and it is governed by the host’s and admin’s settings, not by the waiting room. That gets its own teardown, coming soon.

Microsoft Teams: the lobby is the control

In Teams, the lobby setting decides whether a bot ever reaches the call: set Who can bypass the lobby? to Only me and co-organizers or People who were invited in Meeting options, and uninvited bots wait outside until you decline them. Anonymous bots never get in at all if your admin has disabled anonymous join in the Teams admin center.

Mid-meeting, removal works like Zoom: open the participant list, remove the bot. The difference is organizational reach. Teams tenants can block third-party apps centrally, so if notetaker bots are a recurring problem across your company, the durable answer is an admin policy, not per-meeting vigilance.

Teams Copilot and meeting recap, like Zoom AI Companion, sit inside the platform and ignore all of these controls. Different mechanism, different post.

Google Meet: turn on host management

Meet blocks uninvited bots when Host management is on: anyone not on the calendar invite has to knock, and you decline the knock. Without it, anyone in your organization, including a bot joining through a participant’s account, can enter directly.

• Toggle Host management in the meeting’s host controls.
• Decline the join request when the bot knocks. Declining twice blocks that account from asking again for the meeting.
• To eject a bot that got in through an invited participant’s grant, use the people panel and remove it like any participant.

Gemini’s “take notes for me” is again a platform feature, not a bot, and needs its own handling.

PLATFORM        GATE CONTROL           WHAT IT CANNOT SEE

Zoom            Waiting Room           Zoom AI Companion,
                                       botless capture
Teams           Lobby (invited only)   Teams Copilot recap,
                                       botless capture
Google Meet     Host management        Gemini "take notes",
                                       botless capture

The fix that sticks: revoke the calendar grant

Bots stop coming when the calendar grant that sends them is revoked, and that takes about two minutes. If the bot follows one colleague or client into every meeting, it is their grant. Send them this:

• In the notetaker’s own settings, turn off auto-join (Otter: Settings, then the calendar and auto-join options; Read AI and Fireflies have equivalents). This keeps the account but stops the bot.
• To cut it off entirely: in a Google account, go to Security, then third-party apps with account access, and remove the notetaker. In a Microsoft account, review app permissions under My Apps and revoke consent there.
• Read AI additionally offers a host-side opt-out that tells its bots not to join meetings you organize, regardless of whose calendar invited them.

One revoked grant beats every per-meeting control above, because it removes the standing invitation instead of bouncing each arrival.

What blocking bots cannot do

Here is the honest limit: every control in this post polices the participant list, and the participant list is no longer where meeting capture happens. The current generation of notetakers is botless. They capture audio at the operating-system level on a participant’s own machine, appear nowhere in the meeting, and stream the call to the vendor’s cloud exactly as a bot would have (see Bot-Free Is Not the Same as Private).

You cannot see that from the host seat. No waiting room, lobby, or host management toggle detects software running on someone else’s laptop. If your reason for ejecting bots is that you do not want the call leaving the room, the only tools left are the old ones: consent norms, a direct question, and contract language that covers AI tools, not just “recording” (see An AI Notetaker Should Not Be a Participant in Your Call).

If the problem is where the audio goes, solve that instead

If you are the one who needs notes, the clean answer is not a stealthier capture method. It is capture that has nothing to hide because nothing leaves. Fazit runs on your Mac, joins nothing, and streams nothing:

• Audio is processed in a fixed-size ring buffer in RAM, never written to disk, never uploaded, continuously overwritten during the call (see Why “Never Records” Is Not Marketing).
• Transcription and summarization run on-device on Apple Silicon. There is no vendor cloud for the call to land in, which is the difference the whole comparison turns on (see Fazit vs. Cloud AI Notetakers).
• What survives is one Markdown note in your Obsidian vault, stamped audio_retained: false. Your notes, your files, no bot in anyone’s participant list and no server holding the audio.

Nobody has to admit it, remove it, or revoke it, because it never asked to join. Full security posture: getfazit.com/security.

FAQ

Why does Otter keep joining my Zoom meetings?

Someone on the invite connected their calendar to Otter and has auto-join enabled. OtterPilot scans that calendar and dials into every event with a meeting link. Removing the bot from one call does not stop the next one; the fix is turning off auto-join in Otter’s settings or revoking Otter’s calendar access in the Google or Microsoft account that granted it.

Can I stop an AI notetaker before the meeting starts?

Yes. Zoom’s Waiting Room, Teams’ lobby (set to invited people or organizers only), and Meet’s Host management all hold uninvited participants, including bots, at the door until you admit or decline them. Bots that join as guests are also stopped by requiring authenticated users.

Can a removed bot rejoin the meeting?

Only if the platform allows it. Zoom keeps removed participants out unless Allow removed participants to rejoin was enabled. Meet blocks an account from knocking again after two declines. In all cases the bot returns for the next meeting unless the underlying calendar grant is revoked.

Is it rude to kick an AI notetaker out of a meeting?

It is the host’s call, and by 2026 it is a normal one. The better move is a sentence at the top of the call: “I’d rather this one not be recorded, can you dismiss your notetaker?” Most people comply immediately, and the ones who cannot explain why their tool needs the audio have answered a different question.

How do I know if someone is recording without a bot?

From the host seat, you cannot. Botless notetakers capture system audio on the participant’s own machine and are invisible to the meeting platform. That is why participant-list controls are a partial defense, and why direct consent questions and AI-tool contract language have not been made obsolete by any setting (see Bot-Free Is Not the Same as Private).