Why Otter.ai joins your meetings, and how to stop it

1 October 2026

Most people searching for this did not install anything. A Notetaker appeared in the participant list of a call they were invited to, under a name they half recognise, and the obvious question — where is the switch — has no answer, because the switch is in an account that is not theirs. There is still something you can do about it in the next ten seconds, and it works whether or not you have ever used Otter.

Why is Otter.ai joining my meetings?

Because of a calendar, and usually not yours. Otter’s own article on deduplication says which calendar it reads: Otter “will look at the calendar event guest list and see how many Workspace team members have their Notetaker set to auto-join the meeting.” The guest list — so anyone invited to the event can bring a Notetaker into it, and your own settings have no part in that.

The same article explains the calls with two of them: deduplication happens “only amongst members of the same Workspace”, and “if a guest on the calendar event is an Otter user but is not in the same Workspace, their Notetaker will still join the meeting.” Two companies on one call, two Notetakers, and nobody has misconfigured anything.

Otter also documents five defaults an account can be set to, and one of them joins every calendar event that has a valid meeting link. Somebody who chose that once, months ago, is not deciding anything per meeting. The others narrow it to events that person organises, to events with a guest outside their domain, to events with none, or to events picked by hand. Which is why “who invited this” is often answered by “nobody, this time”.

The one thing that works when the account is not yours

Type stop otter in the meeting chat.

That is not a workaround; it is documented behaviour, and the two sentences that matter are Otter’s own. “Any meeting participant, including those without an Otter account, can remove Notetaker.” And: “All meeting participants can type ‘stop otter’ in the Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams meeting chat. All Notetakers will be immediately removed.” You do not need to be the host, the organiser, or a customer.

Four details from the same article are worth having before you use it.

It covers Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, and it covers both “auto-joined calendar event meetings and meetings you manually add a Notetaker to”.
It is all of them or none. With several Notetakers in the room the command removes every one; Otter documents separate routes for removing a single one.
The other participant-side route — opening the conversation from the link the Notetaker posts — only exists if that Otter account has its chat messages switched on. Otter names the typed command as the alternative when they are off, which is the reason this page leads with the command rather than the link.
It is a command, not a menu, so it does not move when the interface does. That is also why it is the only literal string reproduced on this page.

If it is your account

Then there are several switches rather than one, and the order below is the order in which people are surprised by them. Every row is something Otter states in its help centre; the button names and menu paths are deliberately not reproduced here, because those are the part that goes stale, and the articles are linked in the footnote.

What you want	What Otter documents
Stop it joining new events by default	One account-level default, with five documented options. The narrowest joins only the events you turn on by hand
The events already on your calendar	“Previous events that were manually toggled on/off will retain the setting.” Changing the default does not reach them, and Otter tells you to review them
A recurring series	“Enabling auto-join for a recurring event once will enable it for the rest of the series”
A change made shortly before the call	Otter asks for 30 minutes’ notice: changes “less than 30 minutes in advance may prevent Notetaker from joining successfully or on time”. Read the other way round, a late switch-off may not land
No calendar sync at all	Disconnecting removes previously synced future events and stops new ones syncing. Past events and their conversations stay

The second row is the one that produces the angry follow-up search. A default is a default: it applies to events nobody has touched. If you spent a week last spring switching Notetaker on for individual meetings, those meetings still have it on, and the new default is not a retroactive instruction.

What disconnecting the calendar does not do

It closes the automatic route and only that one. Otter documents adding a Notetaker “using a valid meeting URL”, explicitly including meetings “where the event is not on your Otter calendar”. A disconnected calendar does not make a meeting unreachable; it makes it a paste away. The same article notes that “the meeting host may need to admit Notetaker from the waiting room”, which is the host-side lever, and the chat command above is the everyone-else-side one.

There is one more lever, and most readers cannot reach it: Otter lets enterprise workspace admins block joining on keywords in the meeting title, and says the feature “is not yet available in the Otter UI” — an admin has to ask support for it. It also applies only to that workspace’s own members, so it does not stop a Notetaker arriving with someone from another company.

Where OpenNoteTaker sits

There is nothing to remove, because nothing joins. It records the audio already playing in your own browser tab together with your microphone, and transcribes it with Whisper compiled to WebAssembly inside the page. No guest appears in the attendee list and no one has to admit anything.

That is a different problem from the one this page is about, and worth saying plainly: nothing here helps you with a Notetaker that somebody else brought, and nothing about our design stops one. The chat command does. The other products in this category work differently again — Read.ai and Fathom have modes where there is no bot to send a command to — and whether a recorder joins the call turns out to say very little about where the audio goes next.

The durable fix is not a setting anyway. Say in the invite, or in the first minute, whether the call is being recorded and by what. Every recording here opens on a consent screen with words to read out loud, and there is no way to skip it, which is the most a piece of software can do about a question that belongs to the room.

Record a meeting · Recording a Teams meeting · What leaves your device

Everything attributed to Otter above was read on 1 October 2026 from Otter’s own help centre, through its public content API, and is quoted rather than paraphrased into a click path: see its articles on removing Notetaker from a meeting, stopping it joining automatically and disconnecting a calendar. No menu path, button name or screenshot is reproduced, with one exception: stop otter is a typed command, so it survives an interface change that any of the rest would not. If one of those articles has changed since, the correction belongs in this page — it is in the same repository as the product.