An Uninvited Guest: What you should know about Otter AI’s Notetaker.

Image (Gemini 3, Thinking, prompt: generate an image or cartoon of an Otter trying to creep into a virtual meeting)

Recently, a faculty member reported that Otter.ai joined their Google Meet without being invited, without asking permission, and they would not have known about it except for the fact that they got an email from Otter.ai with a transcript of the meeting. Reportedly, no one in the meeting had intentionally activated it. No one pressed record. If you or one of your students have ever signed up for Otter.ai, this could happen to you too.

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Otter.ai may still be auto-joining and recording your meetings if you ever connected it to your calendar, even if you stopped using it long ago. If you’re an Otter account holder, turn off auto-join in your settings, revoke Otter’s access to your Google Calendar via your Google security settings, or remove the Chrome extension. Meeting hosts can use waiting rooms or trusted-participant settings as a stopgap, but the real fix is on the Otter user’s side.
(How) does this happen?

Otter.ai is primarily an AI notetaker which can transcribe and summarize meetings and audio files. Many people have tried Otter.ai over the last few years for such purposes as capturing notes from an interview, a committee meeting, or a lecture, and some have since set it aside. No longer using the tool is not enough, however.  During the initial sign-up, users may have allowed Otter’s AI Notetaker to connect directly to their calendar (Google, Outlook, etc.) and once connected, it automatically scans their upcoming events for meeting links. It will join those meetings, whether it be in Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams, and begin transcribing whether users meant to use it that day or not, and it continues after users decided to stop using it.
This means that someone who signed up for a free trial a year ago and hasn’t opened the app since may still have Otter.ai silently waiting to join the next meeting link it finds on their calendar, and the result is that the host and participants of the meeting may receive an email with a generated summary and/or transcript of a conversation they didn’t know was being recorded.

While we trust the incident we heard from the faculty member, we have not been able to replicate this exact outcome. In our own testing, the Otter.ai app announced itself as a participant, appeared visibly in the meeting roster, and the host was required to grant it entry. We could not produce a scenario where it slipped by entirely undetected. The Otter Chrome extension and using the record feature via the Otter.ai website is a different story. Using the Chrome extension, I was able to record a Google Meet session without any notification appearing to other participants. Using the record feature via the Otter.ai website in my browser (see under Using a web browser), also allowed me to record a Google Meet or Zoom session in the background without notification to others. In some ways, it works similarly like using your laptop’s record or memo feature running in the background. Regardless, in my testing I still saw a clear popup indicating that the recording was underway when using the Chrome extension, or in the case of using the record button via the Otter.ai website, I still had to click on “record.” Most importantly, the recording did not start itself. Either I had to manually tell Otter to begin recording, or at some earlier point, I would have had to enable the auto-record option, which then kicked in for future meetings. Either way, I made a choice at least once. Otter did not act entirely on its own.

What this suggests is that in the cases being reported, on our campus and elsewhere, there is likely an actor in the loop, even if that person has long since forgotten clicking a toggle, granting permission, or setting an option during initial setup. That doesn’t make the outcome less disruptive for the other people in the meeting. But it does point to where the probable solution lives: with the Otter user, and the settings they may not realize they left on.  

So where does that leave us? Cautiously prepared.

If you are the host of the meeting where Otter.ai shows up uninvited, you can eject it, as Otter.ai should announce its presence and appear visibly. But ejecting Otter.ai is a band-aid, not a fix. Otter.ai will simply attempt to join again the next time it finds a meeting link on that user’s calendar.

The more durable host-side solution is to adjust your meeting access settings. In our testing with Google Meet, setting access to Trusted participants (see under Control joining access) and enabling the waiting room seems to block Otter.ai from getting in without explicit host approval. Likewise in Zoom, you can enable the waiting room, or block certain users from a domain, such as otter.ai, and more. While that is helpful and a good layer of protection, it does mean that you will always need to make sure your settings for your meeting are set properly, for as long as the Otter.ai user on the other end hasn’t addressed their settings.

The best, most efficient way is on the Otter.ai user’s side. If you are the Otter.ai account holder, there are three main ways you can stop this from happening, and you may end up doing more than one of these.

• If you wish to keep the program, the most important step is to turn off auto-join found in the meetings, Notetaker section of your Otter.ai settings. 
• Regarding Carleton and your Google Calendar, go to your Calendar through your Google account security settings (myaccount.google.com/security), and then click on Third-party apps & services, find Otter from the list, and delete all connections you have with Otter and Google.
• Lastly, if you installed the Otter Chrome extension, you would also want to go to your Chrome menu in your browser, select extensions, manage extensions, and find Otter and click “Remove.”
  • If you wish to keep the extension, toggle off the automatic record option that appears in the Otter.ai pop-up when a new Google Meet starts.

A final takeaway

The auto-join feature can be useful when you want it, and the company provides a way to turn it off. But the default settings, at least to me, prioritize convenience over consent, and that’s a design choice worth understanding. Consent always matters. It’s worth noting that even if Minnesota is a one-party consent state, meaning only the person who authorized Otter needs to be aware, that legal framing doesn’t make an unannounced transcript feel any less like a breach of trust. Meetings, advising conversations, and departmental discussions carry expectations of confidentiality, and an unanticipated email of a recording can erode the trust that makes those conversations possible. 

As AI tools become more embedded in the tools we have used for years and within all of our devices, it’s worth asking a question that I find myself quite often asking: what have I given permission to, and is it still doing what I think it’s doing? A quick audit (Android / iOS / Windows) of which apps have access to your calendar, microphone, camera, files, and location services is good practice, and it takes less time than the awkward explanation afterward.

Have you encountered other AI tools behaving in unexpected ways? We’d like to hear about it as these are the kinds of experiences that help us support our campus more effectively.