How to record a Google Meet without a bot joining the call

You want a record of the call and you do not want "Notetaker" sitting in the participant list while a client watches.

There is a way round it that has nothing to do with Meet's settings. Record on your own computer instead. Nothing joins the call, so there is nothing to admit, explain or apologise for.

Why this works

Meet sends the call audio to your computer so you can hear it. Your microphone sends your voice the other way. Both of those exist on your machine already, and capture happens there, underneath the browser.

Meet has no idea it is happening, because nothing changed inside the meeting. The guest list is whatever the organiser invited.

The six steps

1. Tell people you are recording. Say it in the first minute. This is the step everybody wants to skip and the one that matters most.
2. Join Meet exactly as you normally do, in the browser or the desktop application. No extension, no plugin, no change to your setup.
3. Start capture in yapyap on the same computer. It takes your microphone and the computer's own audio output at the same time.
4. Have the meeting. Nothing to watch. Capture keeps running if you switch tabs, share your screen, or move to a breakout room.
5. Stop capture when the call ends. Transcription starts on your machine. Nothing uploads.
6. Open the transcript and pick a write-up. Minutes, an action list, decisions, or a brief for somebody who missed it.

Three things that trip people up

You are wearing headphones. The call audio still arrives. It comes from the computer rather than from the air in the room, so headphones make no difference to what gets recorded. This surprises people who assume a microphone has to hear the speakers.

Meet is in a second browser profile, or a different browser entirely. No difference. Capture sits below the browser, so profiles, tabs and windows are invisible to it.

Somebody dials in by phone. Their audio comes through Meet like everybody else's, so it records like everybody else's.

Who said what

Recording both sides separately has a useful side effect. Your microphone and the call audio arrive as two distinct tracks, so the software never has to guess whether a voice was you or somebody on the far end. That is a physical fact rather than a judgement call, and it is the part of speaker labelling that does not go wrong.

Names still need a moment of your attention the first time. Label the voices once and they carry forward to your later recordings of the same people.

The alternative, and when to use it

Meet records natively if your Google Workspace plan includes it, and the host controls it. In a corporate setting that is the least surprising option, and the recording lands in your organisation's Drive.

Use that when the recording is meant to be the company's. Record on your own machine when the write-up is for your work rather than the organisation's archive, or when the plan does not include recording, or when the meeting is on somebody else's Workspace and you are a guest.

What you end up with

A recording, a transcript with names on it, and whatever write-up you asked for, all on your own disk. No account, no upload, no monthly payment, and a guest list with only people on it.

For the fuller argument about why the bot is worth avoiding, see what a meeting bot is. The same approach works for Microsoft Teams.