Meeting notes without a bot in the call
Your notetaker used to join meetings and now it sits in the lobby, or never arrives at all. That is not a fault at their end. Teams has learned to spot recording bots, and administrators have been given a switch to stop them.
What changed
Through 2026 Microsoft added bot detection to Teams meetings: behavioural and infrastructure signals that tell a participant that is a person from one that is a service dialling in to record. On top of that detection, Teams meeting policy now carries three settings for external bots:
- AllowAllBots — a detected bot joins like anyone else.
- RequireApprovalWhenDetected — the default. The bot waits in the lobby for a human to admit it.
- BlockDetectedBots — it is refused outright. No lobby, no decision for the organiser to make.
Two details matter if you are trying to work out what happened to yours. Blocking is off by default — an administrator has to choose it, so nothing changed for organisations that did nothing. And it only applies to bots Teams actually identifies as bots.
The default is already enough to break the habit. Even with nothing configured, a bot lands in the lobby and somebody has to let it in. In a client's meeting that means asking a room full of people to admit an unfamiliar application before the conversation can start.
Why it is being locked down
From an administrator's side a note-taking bot is an unmanaged participant that carries the contents of a private meeting out to a service the organisation never reviewed. Most arrive because one employee signed up, which is why this lands under security policy rather than meeting settings. Whatever you think of that, it is the direction of travel, and a workflow that depends on being admitted to other people's meetings is built on something the host can withdraw.
Your options now
Ask to be allowed in
Realistic inside your own organisation: ask IT to allow your notetaker specifically. Not realistic across every client and supplier whose meetings you join, since each has its own administrator and its own policy.
Use Teams' own transcription
Built in, free on most business plans, and nothing joins the call because Teams is already there. The limit is whose meeting it is: only somebody in the organiser's tenant can start it, so it is unavailable exactly when you are a guest. Details in transcribing without Copilot and when it is not your meeting.
Read the captions that are already on screen
Teams will write down the whole conversation for you, on request, in anybody's meeting: More (…) → Language and speech → Turn on live captions. Any participant can do it, guest or not, on any licence. Nobody is notified, because captions are an accessibility feature rather than a recording. The text is already there, with the right names against it — it is simply thrown away at the end of the call.
Keeping the captions
Whispifys is a Chrome extension that keeps them. It reads the captions Teams is showing on your own screen and saves each line as it settles, into a timestamped transcript you can search months later.
- Nothing joins the meeting. No extra participant, no lobby, no attendee for anyone to admit — so there is nothing for a bot policy to detect or refuse.
- No announcement, because live captions are not announced.
- Real speaker names, taken from Teams rather than guessed from a voice, so a transcript says who spoke instead of "Speaker 2".
- It works in every tenant, because it never asks any of them for anything.
- Search and summaries across all of it — group a recurring call, a project or a client, and ask one question across every meeting at once.
It runs on teams.microsoft.com and the other Teams hosts and nowhere else, which is the point: it is a reader of your own screen, not a participant.
Not joining the call does not exempt you from saying so. Nobody is told a record is being kept, which makes telling them your job. In many places everyone's consent is required before a conversation is recorded in any form. Our terms put that duty on the person doing the recording, because that is where it sits in law.