How to record a meeting without a bot joining

What “without a bot” actually means

Bot-based tools — Otter, Fireflies and most of the well-known names — capture audio by sending a participant into the meeting. That is a sound engineering decision. It works on every platform, it works when you join from your phone, and it works when your laptop is shut. The audio arrives cleanly because it comes from the meeting server itself.

The alternative is to record at the operating-system level: capture the sound your computer is already playing, plus your microphone, and mix the two. The meeting platform is not involved and has no way to know it is happening, so nothing appears in the participant list. Everything below is a variation on that one idea.

Not announced is not the same as not disclosed. None of these methods tell the other people in the call. That is a technical fact and not permission — consent rules vary by country and by state, and in a fair number of places recording someone without telling them is illegal. Say you're recording. It takes four seconds, and it costs you nothing that the bot wasn't already costing you.

1. The recording button already in your meeting app

Zoom, Teams and Google Meet all record. No bot joins, because the platform is doing it itself. It is free, there is nothing to install, and it is the right answer more often than the internet admits.

What it costs you: it is usually gated on your account tier or on being the host, everyone gets the on-screen “recording” banner, and you end up with a video file rather than a transcript. Teams and Meet park the file in the organisation's cloud, which is a different privacy question rather than no privacy question. If you want a record of the call and nothing more, stop here.

2. QuickTime and a loopback driver

macOS will not hand an ordinary app the audio coming out of your speakers, so the long-standing workaround is a virtual audio device — BlackHole (free) or Rogue Amoeba's Loopback (paid) — routed into QuickTime or Audacity. Set up an aggregate device, point the recorder at it, press record.

What it costs you: about forty minutes the first time, a system audio configuration you will forget you changed, and the fact that you must remember to press record before every single call. Still no transcript. This is the enthusiast's answer, and it is a perfectly good one if you record rarely.

3. A local, open-source notetaker

Meetily and Anarlog both record system audio without a bot and then transcribe it on your own machine, using open speech models like Whisper or Parakeet. No audio leaves the computer at any point. Both are open source and free, and Meetily runs on Windows as well as macOS.

What it costs you: local transcription is slower than a cloud API and generally less accurate, particularly on speaker labelling and on accented speech; the models are large downloads; and you are running software maintained by volunteers. If “the audio must never leave this machine” is a hard requirement, these are the honest answer and you should use them.

4. A bot-free Mac app

Granola and Minutehand both sit on the Mac, capture system audio plus microphone, and never appear in the call. They differ in what they do next: Granola writes you AI notes and keeps them in its own app on a subscription, and Minutehand writes a Markdown file into a folder on your disk and stops there.

What it costs you: money, and — for both of these — transcription happens in the cloud rather than on the machine.

Side by side

Where Minutehand fits

Minutehand is the fourth option, built for one specific situation: you already do your thinking inside Claude or ChatGPT, and what you want from a meeting is the raw transcript sitting in a folder your agent can read, without you doing anything.

It watches your calendar, so a couple of minutes before a meeting starts a notification asks whether to record that one. That is the part the free methods cannot do, and it is the difference between a tool you use and a tool you meant to use. When the call ends, the audio is transcribed and a Markdown file lands in your folder with the title, date, duration and attendees at the top of it. There is no summary, deliberately — your agent has your email, your files and your last six months of work, and writes a better one than any meetings app could.

The trade-off, stated plainly: transcription happens at Deepgram, under your own account and key. Audio goes there and nowhere else — we run no servers of our own, so it never comes to us — but it is not on-device transcription, and if that is your requirement then Meetily or Anarlog above are the right tool and this one isn't. What you get for it is fast, accurate transcription with speaker labels, no models to download, and a bill from Deepgram that starts with $200 of free credit — over 300 hours of meetings.

One payment, a licence for two Macs, no subscription. See what it does and what it costs →

Common questions

Can I record a call without anyone knowing?

Technically yes, and that is exactly the question worth being careful about. No bot-free method announces itself, but consent rules vary by country and by state, and in plenty of places recording a conversation without telling the other people in it is illegal. Tell them.

Why do notetakers join as a participant at all?

Because it is the most reliable way to get clean audio, and it works no matter what device you joined from. The cost is visibility — the bot appears in the list with your name on it.

Is capturing system audio on a Mac hard?

It used to need a virtual audio driver installed by hand. Current apps use the system's own capture, which asks for Screen Recording permission once in System Settings and then works everywhere. macOS applies that permission after a full quit and relaunch, which catches most people out exactly once.

What's the best free option?

Your meeting app's own recording, if you only need the recording. If you want a transcript as well and want it free, Meetily or Anarlog.

Does this work with Zoom, Meet and Teams?

All of them, and anything else that makes sound — a webinar, a phone call on speaker, two people at a table. Recording the machine's audio means there is no per-platform integration to break.

Do I need a Deepgram account to use Minutehand?

Yes, and it takes about two minutes — here's how to get the key. New accounts come with $200 of credit, so the first few hundred hours cost nothing.