Removing Read.ai and Fathom from a meeting

1 October 2026

These two get searched for in the same breath and do not work the same way, which is why the same advice keeps failing on one of them. Read.ai normally puts an agent in the call that any participant can dismiss with a chat message. Fathom, in its current version, puts nothing in the call at all — so there is nothing to remove, and the levers belong to the person running it.

Why one of these arrives uninvited is a synced calendar belonging to somebody else, and that mechanism is the same across the category. It is laid out in why Otter.ai joins your meetings and is not repeated here.

How do I turn off read on Microsoft Teams?

That phrase means two unrelated things. If you mean read receipts — the confirmation that tells a sender you opened their message — that is a Microsoft Teams feature with its own setting, and Microsoft’s help page adds that “your admin decides whether you have this feature and the ability to turn it off”. It stops nothing recording. If you mean Read.ai, read on: everything below applies to Teams, Zoom and Google Meet alike, because the levers belong to the bot and the platform rather than to one product.

What is actually in the call

Read the second and fourth rows twice. Both products now have a mode in which nothing joins, and there is then no bot to remove and no command to send. Asking the person is the only route, and both vendors say so themselves.

How do I opt out of Read AI?

In web mode, any attendee can end it from the meeting chat. Read.ai documents two commands that do different things: Read Stop makes it leave and keep what it already captured as a report, and Opt Out makes it leave and delete everything measured in that session. Read.ai states that any participant can use them, that the host need not send the command, and that the person who invited it need not approve. It is the same on Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, because the command goes to the bot rather than the platform.

One caveat matters more than the commands, and it is Read.ai’s own: if it posted an opt-out link in the chat, you must use the link and typing the command will not work. So read the message it left when it joined — which, per Read.ai, also names whoever invited it.

Two other moments exist. Before the meeting, some organisations send guests an advance email with an opt-out link, and Read.ai says the same link lets you change your mind until the meeting starts. After it, deletion is a request rather than a button: Read.ai’s account and privacy centre sends the request to whoever owns the report, because only they can delete it. Nothing undoes a recording that already happened.

One Zoom wrinkle explains “it never even asked”: Read.ai says that if a host has installed its Zoom app or connected their Zoom account, Zoom has already issued it a token and no admission prompt appears. It is still in the participant list, and the chat commands still work.

How to remove Fathom from a Zoom call

The honest answer depends on a version you cannot see from inside the call. Two facts from Fathom’s own help centre do most of the work. First, Fathom only records while the Fathom user is present, and it exits when the meeting ends — so unlike a calendar bot it cannot be sent to a call its owner does not attend. Second, Fathom lists “Fathom is kicked by the host” among the reasons a capture does not happen, which confirms host removal as an expected outcome where a bot is present.

On the bot-free version there is nothing in the attendee list. Fathom says plainly that “there’s no way to silently record”: the bot version is visible and Zoom notifies participants, and the bot-free version posts a message in the meeting chat when recording starts, or prompts the person in-app if that message is off. So on a Zoom call, look for the chat message or Zoom’s own indicator rather than for a participant.

Fathom’s help centre documents no chat command for other participants. Its page on removing Fathom from an active call lists four routes, every one of them an action by the Fathom user or by the host removing a participant. That is an absence in documentation, not proof that no such command exists, and it is offered here as the former. If you are neither the host nor the Fathom user, the documented route is to ask.

Fathom’s consent step has limits it publishes itself: the consent email goes out 24 hours ahead for external scheduled meetings and never for same-day or unscheduled ones, and a decline switches off auto-record for that call — but “recording is not permanently blocked”, because the host can still ask out loud and start it by hand.

Why it keeps happening

Because the account is usually not yours. Read.ai’s own explanation of accounts nobody remembers creating is that you were sent a meeting summary, signed up to read it, and connected a calendar in the same short flow. If you have already stopped it and it still turns up, Read.ai gives two causes: someone else invited to the call is using it — and they need only be invited, not attend — or a second account of yours is still set to join.

Every lever on this page is per-call or per-account, and in the two device-capture modes there is none at all. The durable fix is not technical: say in the invite, or in the first minute, whether the call is recorded and by what.

Where OpenNoteTaker sits

There is nothing to remove, because nothing joins. It records the audio already playing in your browser tab, together with your microphone, and transcribes it with Whisper compiled to WebAssembly inside the page. Nobody has to admit a guest.

That is the same architectural family as the two device-capture modes above, so the difference is drawn where it is real, in where the audio goes next: nothing is uploaded to record, transcribe, separate speakers or export, because there is no server of ours for it to go to. On consent it does the only thing it can — every recording opens on a screen with words to read out loud, and there is no way to skip it.

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

Read.ai’s and Fathom’s behaviour was read from their own help centres on 1 October 2026 and is described in terms of what those articles say. No menu path, button name or screenshot is reproduced: that is the part that goes stale, and a stale instruction reads as authoritative while being wrong. Where their documentation is silent, this page says so rather than filling the gap.