A Teams AI note taker that is not in the attendee list

18 October 2026

OpenNoteTaker (opennotetaker.app) is a Teams AI note taker for meetings you join in a browser tab. It records the tab’s audio and your microphone, transcribes them in the page, and pulls out decisions and action items — without sending a bot into the call and without uploading the recording.

First: the Teams desktop app

Many people join Teams from the installed desktop app, and that is the one case this Teams AI note taker cannot hear on its own. The desktop app is not a browser tab, and no browser can reach its sound. There are two ways through:

• Join from the web client instead. Open the meeting link in Chrome or Edge and join on the web rather than in the app. Then OpenNoteTaker records it like any other tab.
• Or install a loopback device, which presents your computer’s output to every application as if it were a microphone: BlackHole on macOS, VB-Cable (or “Stereo Mix”) on Windows, and the existing .monitor input on Linux. Pick it under Choose which input, and turn off Clean up the sound, which is built for a real microphone.

Recording a Teams meeting in the browser

1. Join the meeting in a Chrome or Edge tab, as yourself.
2. Press Record a meeting. The optional extension recognises Teams meeting links as they open and offers to start; it never records anything itself.
3. Read out the consent screen. It opens before every recording and cannot be skipped.
4. Pick the Teams tab in the share dialog with “share audio” ticked.
5. Stop when the call ends, and let it transcribe in the same tab.

Tab audio — which is everyone else on the call — can only be captured in Chrome and Edge, and only when you pick the tab and tick “share audio” in the browser’s share dialog. Capturing your microphone alone is not enough: echo cancellation removes everyone else, and the app warns you if the tab is switched off mid-call.

Teams meeting transcription, kept on your machine

Whisper runs inside the page in 99 languages, so this Teams AI note taker never sends the audio anywhere. The language is detected every few seconds, which keeps a bilingual meeting readable. Speakers are separated on your device: good with two or three distinct voices, poor with crosstalk, and easy to correct by hand.

What you keep is a note: decisions, action items, deadlines, open questions and topics, each linked to the moment it was said, plus search across every meeting and exports in SRT, WebVTT, text, Markdown, JSON, CSV and HTML. All of that is free. Writing full minutes needs a language model, so AI-written minutes, questions across your library and translating a finished transcript use credits on our backend. They send transcript text, never audio.

Why a Teams AI note taker without a bot

A bot is a participant: someone admits it, everyone sees it, and an IT policy can block it. This Teams AI note taker has nothing to admit and nothing to approve, because it listens through the tab you are already in. Notes live in your own browser storage; there is no server of ours holding your meetings.

What it cannot do

• The desktop app, without the web client or a loopback device (above).
• Firefox and Safari, which do not give a page tab audio.
• Copy the organiser’s recording. This is your own transcript, visible to nobody else.

OpenNoteTaker is an open-source AI note taker (MIT or Apache-2.0). For the full walkthrough, see recording a Microsoft Teams meeting in your browser. The same method works in Google Meet, and here is everything that is free.

Questions