A meeting bot is a piece of software that joins a video call as its own participant — with a name, usually an avatar, and a tile in the grid like anyone else on the call — so that the AI notetaker behind it can pull an audio and video feed directly from the meeting platform. It's one of two common ways a notetaker gets its audio; the other is recording whatever a computer can already hear, with nothing added to the call at all.
What it looks like from inside the meeting
Everyone on the call sees it: a tile labelled something like "Otter.ai Notetaker" or "Fireflies.ai Notes Taker" sitting in the participant list next to the people who are actually there. Most platforms show a recording indicator the moment it joins, and some show it in the waiting room before anyone admits it. It behaves like a guest, because to the call, that's what it is.
Which tools use one
Otter and Fireflies both work this way, and so do the recap features built into Zoom AI Companion and Microsoft Teams. Granola and Coii AudioNotes don't: both record the computer's own microphone and the audio it's already playing, and neither adds anything to the participant list. Getting the feed straight from the platform is what a bot buys a vendor — it works the same way across whichever video app the call happens to run on, without needing access to the machine's own audio hardware, and it keeps working even if the meeting's host is on a different laptop than whoever asked for the notes.
That reach is a real trade-off, not a false one. A bot can sit in on a call that nobody in the room is running Coii AudioNotes for, because it only needs an invitation. A tool that records locally instead needs to be running on a machine that's actually in the call, which rules out capturing someone else's meeting after the fact — the bot's approach and the local approach solve different problems, not the same one twice.
Why some people would rather not have one
A bot's name on the participant list is visible to everyone on the call, including the other side of the table. In a client pitch, a job interview, or a negotiation, that visibility is the whole objection — it's an admission that the call is being recorded, made in front of everyone at once, whether or not that was the intent. The case for recording without one comes down to exactly that: the recording still happens, just without announcing itself as a fourth participant.
The alternative
A tool that skips the bot needs another way to get the audio, and that's system audio capture — recording the microphone and whatever sound the computer is already playing, without joining the call as anything at all. It only works for meetings happening on the same machine doing the recording, which is the trade a bot doesn't have to make: a bot can join a call from anywhere, because it only needs an invitation, not physical presence at the audio source. A round-up of notetakers that skip the bot entirely and what an AI notetaker does more broadly cover the rest of the category.