How to stop Otter, Fireflies, and Read.ai from joining your meetings

A colleague adds Otter Assistant to your standup. Next week their bot joins your 1:1. The week after, your customer's Read.ai bot silently joins a sales call. Suddenly a lot of AI notetakers are transcribing your conversations — and you didn't invite any of them.

This guide walks through how to (1) identify which bot is joining, (2) remove it from a specific meeting, (3) block AI notetaker bots at the meeting-host level so they can't join in the first place, and (4) what to run instead if you still want AI-generated meeting notes.

Why AI notetaker bots are showing up uninvited

Otter, Fireflies, Read.ai, and Fathom (before its 2026 pivot) all default to opt-out rather than opt-in. When a user signs up, the tool scans their calendar and joins every meeting that has a video conference link, unless they turn that behavior off. Most users never do — so the bot appears in meetings the user's counterparts never consented to.

The result: a Chapman University-style ban (Zoom's own docs mention this pattern) and a wave of €58M in GDPR fines in Q1 2026 against companies whose AI notetakers processed personal data without a legal basis. Institutional buyers are increasingly blocking these tools by default.

Step 1: Identify the bot in your call

Bots appear in the participant list with names like:

• Otter Assistant or Otter.ai Notetaker
• Fred or Fireflies.ai Notetaker
• Read.ai Notetaker or Read Meeting Copilot
• Fathom AI Notetaker (older accounts; new Fathom is bot-free as of 2026)

They usually have a robotic avatar and no video feed. In Zoom's participant list they're marked as a "regular attendee" — the tool joins as if a human user had pasted the link, which is why hosts can't always kick them via role-based rules.

Step 2: Remove the bot from THIS meeting

Google Meet

1. Open the People panel (top-right).
2. Find the bot in the list.
3. Hover over its row → click the three-dot menu → Remove from meeting.
4. Optionally check "Report abuse" if it joined without the host's knowledge — Google logs the report and repeated reports can flag the account.

Zoom

1. Open the Participants panel.
2. Hover over the bot → click More → Remove.
3. In the confirmation dialog, tick Report to Zoom if you want Zoom's Trust & Safety team to investigate.

Microsoft Teams

1. Open the meeting roster.
2. Right-click the bot → Remove from meeting.
3. Or, before the meeting: in the meeting options, set Who can bypass the lobby to People I invite so bots forwarded by attendees have to be admitted individually.

Step 3: Block AI notetakers from your meetings at the host level

Zoom (host-side pre-meeting settings)

• Enable Only authenticated users can join in the meeting options. Most notetaker bots authenticate as their vendor's account, which is trivially blockable by domain.
• Under Settings → Meeting → Security, add domains you want to block to the Restricted domains list. Otter's bots use otter.ai; Fireflies' use fireflies.ai; Read.ai's use read.ai.
• Turn on Waiting Room and set it to "everyone" — bots then wait for explicit admission, which surfaces them for the host to reject.

Google Workspace admin (org-wide)

If you're a Google Workspace admin, go to Admin console → Apps → Google Workspace Marketplace apps and block Otter, Fireflies, and Read.ai domain-wide. Users can no longer install the tools' calendar integrations, which is what routes the bot to meetings in the first place.

Microsoft Teams admin

In the Teams Admin Center under Meetings → Meeting policies, disable Anonymous users can join a meeting for your org's default policy. Since most AI notetaker bots enter as anonymous participants, this blocks them at the tenant level.

Step 4: What to use instead — an AI notetaker without the bot

If you still want AI-generated meeting notes but don't want to inflict a bot on other participants, the fix is to run the notetaker in your own browser tab, not as a separate meeting participant. This is what tools like Granola, tl;dv, and — full disclosure — AI Assist now do.

AI Assist takes it a step further: your audio never leaves your machine. Whisper transcription runs through your own OpenAI API key from a local desktop helper, and the LLM that generates summaries runs through your own Anthropic key. There's no cloud pipeline to leak your conversations through. See the comparison table for how it stacks against Otter, Fireflies, Granola, and Tactiq.

The one-time $3 desktop license replaces the ~$240/yr per-seat subscription treadmill, which is often the actual reason people signed up for the bot-based tools in the first place.