There are two reasons people go looking for a notetaker without a bot. One is social: an extra participant called “Notetaker” sitting in the list of a client call reads as surveillance, and someone usually asks. The other is that the bot simply cannot get in any more. Microsoft Teams now sends detected bots to the lobby by default, even in meetings that let everyone else straight in, and a Google Meet host who turns off “Ask to join” has third-party bots denied automatically. Hosts who do that usually mean it, and a botless recorder does not change what they asked for — more on that below.

The good news is that you do not need a bot. Everything a bot hears, your own computer is already hearing. The less obvious news, and the reason this article exists, is that “no bot” no longer tells you where your meeting goes. All seven cloud notetakers I checked can now record without a bot — and of the five whose pages say where the meeting goes next, four put it on a server, theirs or a provider’s. This guide covers that difference, what Zoom, Teams and Meet do themselves, how botless recording fails, and how to set it up so the audio stays on your machine.

Disclosure: I make Samurai Scribe, one of the apps below. Every claim about other products comes from their own pricing pages, help centres and documentation, checked on 26 October 2026 and linked where I make it. This category changes monthly; check before you buy.

The short version: to take notes without a bot, use an app that records your own computer’s audio. To keep the meeting off other people’s servers as well, make sure it also transcribes on your computer — turn the wifi off and see whether it still works. Samurai Scribe does both, on Windows and Mac, and the free tier has no minute cap.

”Botless” answers the wrong question

“No bot” used to set products apart. Today it describes most of the market. From the vendors’ own pages:

Otter has a desktop app for Mac and Windows that will “record any conversation without a bot” across Zoom, Google Meet, Slack huddles and in-person (otter.ai/desktop).
Fireflies has a desktop “Take Notes” mode in which “no bot joins the meeting”; in that mode speakers come out as Speaker 1 and Speaker 2 rather than names (Fireflies guide).
Fathom offers bot-free capture on its free plan, marked as a beta for Mac (pricing).
Granola never had a bot: “Granola runs only on your computer and uses your system audio and microphone” (docs).
tl;dv and Read.ai both ship desktop apps that record without a bot (tl;dv, Read.ai).

What changes between them is the step after capture. Granola is admirably direct about it: it “passes audio directly from your microphone and system audio to our transcription provider”, and does not keep the audio afterwards. That is better than keeping it. It is still your client’s voice on a server you did not choose: the stranger has left the participant list, but not the meeting.

All three give you notes. Only the bot shows up in the meeting, and only the third keeps the audio inside the dashed line — your own computer. "Botless" answers the first question, not the second.

So there are really two questions, and only the first is about bots: does anything join the call, and does the audio leave your computer. The rest of this article is about getting “no” to both.

What to check before you trust a botless notetaker

Five things, each checkable in minutes:

The participant list stays the same. Start a test call with a second device and look. Nothing should join.
It works with the network off. Disconnect, record two minutes, and see whether a transcript appears. This one-minute test settles the “where does the audio go” question better than any privacy page, ours included.
It records the other side through headphones. Play a video through the headset you use for calls and check the recording. This is the failure botless tools actually have (more below).
It keeps you apart from them. Your mic and the call’s audio should be separate tracks.
You get files. A transcript you can open without the app is the difference between owning your notes and renting access to them.

The options, side by side

Checked 26 October 2026 on each vendor’s own pages. Prices are per user per month; where two are given, the lower one is billed annually.

Tool	Without a bot	Where the meeting goes	Free · paid	Transcript as a file
Samurai Scribe	Always; Windows and Mac	Stays on your computer	No minute cap · Pro $19 once	Markdown in your folder, every tier
Otter	Desktop app, Mac and Windows	Otter’s cloud (AWS)	300 min/month · Pro $8.33–16.99	MP3, TXT free; PDF, DOCX on Pro
Fireflies	Desktop “Take Notes” mode, unnamed speakers	Fireflies’ cloud (AWS, GCP)	400 min of storage · Pro $10–18	Paid plans only
Fathom	Beta, Mac only	Fathom’s cloud, stored in the US	Unlimited · Premium $16–20	Copy only, no download
Granola	Always; Mac, Windows, mobile	A transcription provider; audio not kept	30-day history · Business $14	Bulk CSV, once a day
Krisp	Device audio; a bot is optional	English on your device; 15 languages on servers	7-day trial · Core $8–16	TXT download

Two of these deserve more than a row.

Krisp is the closest to local of the cloud products, and it deserves saying: its meeting assistant page says English transcription runs on-device. Its pricing page lists “Private Transcription & Recordings (On-device)” under Enterprise, and from Krisp’s own pages I could not tell which plan gets what. If you are evaluating it, ask them, and run the network-off test.

Fathom’s free tier is genuinely generous, and for sales calls whose notes belong in a CRM anyway it is hard to argue with. What it doesn’t give you is a file (help centre).

What Zoom, Teams and Meet do themselves

Before installing anything, check whether the platform’s own recorder is enough. Often it is, if you host, pay, and are happy for the recording to live in that platform’s cloud.

Zoom. Cloud recording needs a licensed user on Pro or higher, and “only hosts and co-hosts can start a cloud recording” (Zoom). Local recording works on the free plan, but “the host must record the meeting or grant the ability to record to a participant”, and local recordings don’t include audio transcription (Zoom).
Teams. Recording needs a qualifying Microsoft 365 licence and an admin who has enabled it; recordings land in the organiser’s OneDrive or SharePoint, external participants can’t record, and everyone is notified (Microsoft).
Google Meet. Recording needs Business Standard or higher (or certain paid personal plans); free Gmail accounts aren’t on the list, and participants are notified (Google).

The pattern: good, host-controlled, plan-gated, and stored in the platform’s cloud. For a guest, a free plan, or a meeting that shouldn’t sit in anyone’s cloud, they don’t solve it.

Teams can notice a botless recorder

Better learned here than in a meeting: Teams has an admin setting, EnableExternalRecordingDetection, that “detects third-party applications, such as screen recorders, audio recorders, and AI note-takers, capturing audio on the user’s device”, and when it is on, participants are notified (Microsoft). It is off by default, and it applies to every botless recorder, including mine. Botless is not a way around your organisation’s rules.

How botless recording works

A bot is a participant: it joins from the vendor’s servers and hears what everyone else hears. Botless recording joins nothing. It listens to your own computer — the microphone you are talking into and the call audio coming out of your speakers — at the operating-system layer, below Zoom, Teams and the browser.

On Windows that is WASAPI loopback, which needs no permission prompt; the app records the output your call app is actually playing to, not just the default one. On a Mac it is a Core Audio process tap on macOS 14.4 and later, or ScreenCaptureKit on macOS 13 to 14.3, and macOS asks once for System Audio Recording permission. There is no Zoom, Teams or Google integration to approve, and no account to create.

The mic and the call arrive as two separate tracks, which is the most useful property of the design: your voice is on one and everyone else is on the other, so the speaker separation only has to tell apart the people on the far side.

Where botless recording goes wrong

A bot has one real advantage: it hears the meeting the same way whatever your headset, speakers or sound settings. Capturing at the OS layer inherits all of those. Three failure modes are real, and I have shipped bugs in two of them.

Missing the other side. If the call plays to a headset that is not the system’s default output, a naive recorder captures the laptop speakers instead, and you find out after an hour-long meeting that you have half of it. Samurai Scribe had exactly this bug on Windows until v0.60.0 (5 October 2026). That release fixed it, added a system audio check to setup, and added a warning mid-call: if your call app has been on a call for a couple of minutes, you are talking, and nothing from the other side is arriving, the app tells you while there is still time to fix it.

Echo. On laptop speakers rather than headphones, your microphone hears the call too, and the other side ends up transcribed twice — once from the call audio and once from the room, sometimes under your name. Two things fight it: an on-device echo canceller, on by default and applied only to the stretches where the mic actually hears the speakers, and, since v0.60.0, transcribing each track on its own. Measured on three of our own test recordings with Whisper Small: a 26-second clip full of echo went from 77% of words wrong to 19%, a 92-second one from 76% to 22%, and a recording with no echo at all got slightly worse, 7.3% to 8.9%. Three short recordings is a sanity check, not a benchmark, and 19% is not zero. Headphones are still the best fix, and the cheapest.

Names. A bot reads the participant list, so it knows “Priya Shah” joined at 10:02. Audio from your speakers carries no names, so a botless recorder starts at “Speaker 1, Speaker 2” — Fireflies’ own botless mode stops there. Two things narrow the gap: names from a connected calendar’s invite are offered as suggestions, and once you confirm a name the app keeps a voice print for that person, as a file in your vault, and recognises them in later meetings, live as you record. It is not always right; our own error rates are in transcribing an in-person interview with speaker labels.

A bot announces itself. This doesn’t.

A bot in the participant list is a crude form of notice, but it is real. A botless recorder gives nobody any notice at all — which is the whole appeal, and also the whole responsibility. So the duty moves entirely to you. Say that you are recording, at the start, every time. Consent rules depend on where you and the other participants are — some places require everyone’s agreement, some only one party’s — and your employer or your client may have rules of their own about which tools can capture a meeting. A local app removes the third party from your call; it does not remove your obligation to the people on it, and nothing here is legal advice.

Setting it up, step by step

1. Install, and check that it can hear the call

Download it for Windows 10/11 (64-bit) or a Mac with Apple Silicon on macOS 13 or later. There is no account and no email. Setup downloads its models once; after that, recording and transcription need no network.

During setup, run the system audio check: play any video and watch the level bar move. That is the thirty-second test that prevents the worst failure above. On a Mac this is where macOS asks for System Audio Recording permission; on Windows there is nothing to grant.

2. Let it ask when a call starts

Since v0.63.0 the app notices when Zoom, Teams, Webex, Slack, a browser on a Meet call or another call app starts using the microphone, and a small prompt — hidden from screen sharing — asks whether to record. For calls not on your calendar, Settings → Calendar offers Off, Ask to record (the default, free) or record automatically (Pro), and “Never for Zoom” stops it asking about one app. Spotting those calls needs Windows or macOS 14 or later; older macOS can say the microphone is busy but not which app has it.

Connect a calendar and a meeting gets its prompt when its call actually starts, so a meeting you skip records nothing. Calendar sync is the one part of this that uses the network: events are fetched read-only, to your machine, as listed on the network disclosure.

3. Take notes while it records

Press Ctrl+Option+N on a Mac or Win+Alt+N on Windows and the app shrinks to a small companion window over your call, also hidden from screen sharing. One button drops the current time into your notes as a link to that moment in the recording.

4. Afterwards: speakers, summary, files

When you stop, the app separates speakers, writes a summary with a model on your machine, and saves the meeting as a folder of plain Markdown and audio in a folder you choose — an Obsidian vault is detected, and the layout is in meeting notes in Obsidian. The assistant answers questions across your meetings, each answer linking to the moment in the recording it came from — and because the meetings are files, Claude Code, Codex or Cursor can read them too, with your rules.

FAQ

Will the other people in the call know? Not from the software — nothing joins, and the prompt and companion window are hidden from screen sharing — unless a Teams admin has turned on recording detection. They should know from you.

Can I take notes of a meeting I don’t host? Technically, yes: the app records your computer’s audio, not Zoom’s, so it never asks the host and usually triggers no recording banner. That is exactly why it falls to you to say so at the start, and to respect a host or employer who has said no.

Does it work with Google Meet in a browser, or Teams on the web? Yes. Recording happens below the browser. The call prompt counts browsers as call apps; mute one if it asks while you watch videos.

What about meetings in a room, with no call at all? The same app records the room and separates the people in it — the case a bot cannot cover at all.

Is it free? The free tier has no time limit and no minute cap, and includes call recording, speaker labels, voice prints, summaries and the assistant, with the smaller Whisper models and NVIDIA Parakeet. To hear a Pro transcription model on your own audio first, download it in Settings → AI Models → Transcription and try it in Compare models. Pro is $19 once during the beta ($39 after) and adds the larger Whisper models and Parakeet Ultra, recording calls by itself, and the assistant reading a meeting while it is still being recorded.

Does anything leave my computer? Audio, transcripts, speaker work and summaries on the default local model stay on your machine. What the app does send — a daily update check with a few anonymous counts (both can be switched off), model downloads, a licence check if you bought Pro, and calendar sync if you connect one — is itemised on the network disclosure. Don’t take that on trust; pull the network cable and record.

Linux? Intel Macs? Not yet: Windows 10 and 11, and Apple Silicon Macs on macOS 13 or later.

So should you try it?

Not everyone needs to, and the honest version is short.

Use the platform’s own recorder if you host, your plan includes transcripts, and the meeting can live in Zoom’s, Microsoft’s or Google’s cloud. It is already paid for, and everyone is told automatically.

Use a cloud notetaker — botless or not — if your notes need to be a shared archive your team searches together, or flow into a CRM. Local-first tools are genuinely worse at team archives.

Try this if you want your own notes of meetings someone else hosts, and will say so at the start; if the conversations are ones a client, patient or source trusted you with; if you are on Windows and keep finding the good local tools are Mac-only; or if you want the meeting as files you own rather than a page you log in to.

The test takes ten minutes, in two halves. Start a test call on your computer and join it from your phone: you will see the prompt, and see that nothing joined. Then turn the wifi off, play a video and talk over it, and watch a transcript appear with no network. That answers both questions in this article — the bot and the server — better than I can, and what you are left with either way is a folder of Markdown and audio that is yours.

An Otter.ai alternative that works offline — what the August ruling against Otter said.
A Granola alternative for Windows that works offline — the closest cloud product in shape.
Transcribe an in-person interview with speaker labels — voice prints and our own error rates.
Meeting notes in Obsidian, transcribed on your own computer — the files, and what Claude Code or Cursor can do with them.