What Happens When Both Sides of a Call Bring an AI Notetaker?

Two bots, two records, and nobody reconciles them

You join a call with a prospect. Your notetaker is in the participant list. So is theirs. Sometimes there is a third one, belonging to someone on their side who also set their bot to auto join.

Each of those bots records the same conversation, sends it to its own company's account, and produces its own transcript, its own summary and its own list of action items. None of them knows the others exist in any way that matters. When the call ends there are two or three accounts of what was agreed, each owned by a different company, each shaped by a different summary template, and no mechanism anywhere that compares them.

That is the answer to the question most people type. The more useful part is what the vendors have built to deal with duplicates, because it shows exactly where the problem is solved and where it is left alone.

Every vendor removes duplicates inside your company, and only there

Otter calls its version Notetaker Deduplication and is explicit about the boundary. Deduplication happens only among members of the same Workspace, and if a guest on the calendar event uses Otter from a different Workspace, their Notetaker still joins. Otter's own worked example is a meeting called Cross client sync with people from two workspaces, and the result is three Otter notetakers in one call: two from the first company and one from the second.

Fathom has an organisation setting called Single Bot per Meeting. Its description is to prevent multiple Fathom notetakers from your domain from recording a single meeting. The word doing the work is domain. Fathom also states that the setting does not apply to unscheduled meetings, so two colleagues on an impromptu Zoom can still end up with two Fathom records.

Fireflies describes the same idea in terms of teammates: when multiple teammates invite Fireflies to the same meeting, Fireflies joins on behalf of the first person who invited it.

Read the three together and the pattern is the same. Duplicate handling is a feature of an account, and an account belongs to one company. The external call, where the other side has its own tools and its own reasons to keep a record, is exactly the case none of them cover. For anyone whose calendar is mostly customers, clients, candidates or investors, that is most of the calendar.

Inside your company, the tie breaker decides who can read the notes

Removing a duplicate means picking a winner, and the winner's settings become the meeting's settings. This is where the documentation gets interesting, because each vendor picks differently and none of them lets the person in the meeting choose.

Otter looks at which workspace members have auto join on and gives priority to the event organiser. But if the organiser's notetaker is not sharing with all calendar guests and another member's is, that other member's notetaker joins as well. Otter's own tip says it will select the member who is sharing with the most participants whenever possible. Its host override page, written for Enterprise admins, spells out what that means in practice: a host with sharing set to Don't Share and an attendee with sharing set to the workspace domain, and under standard deduplication the conversation may be shared with the workspace even though the host chose not to share. The fix is a setting that, per the same page, is managed by Otter and enabled by contacting your account manager.

Otter also says deduplication is on by default, that it cannot be applied meeting by meeting, that you cannot pick a specific person as the primary recorder, and that turning it off requires the workspace admin to contact Otter support.

Fireflies applies the first inviter's configuration to the whole meeting. Its admin guide tells you to make sure the first person to invite Fireflies has the correct privacy and share settings, because they will apply to the entire meeting. In other words, the privacy level of a sensitive call depends on whose calendar sync happened to fire first.

Fathom changed its rule in April 2025. It used to be whoever clicked record or auto recorded first. It is now whichever bot is admitted from the waiting room and actually starts recording, which hands the decision to whoever is clicking Admit.

None of these rules is unreasonable on its own. Together they mean that in a bot based tool, who can read a meeting's notes is often decided by a selection rule nobody in the meeting looked at. If your team has a mix of people who share everything and people who share nothing, ask the vendor which one wins before you find out from a board call that went to the whole workspace.

Across companies, you end up with records the other side can see and you cannot

Once two companies each have a record, the records go their separate ways. Theirs sits in their account under their retention settings and their sharing rules. Yours sits in yours. You cannot read theirs, correct it, or ask their vendor to delete it.

Fathom says this directly in its consent documentation: if an attendee objects to a recording, the meeting host is the data controller, so the attendee has to contact the recording owner to request deletion. The vendor will not do it for them. The same is true in the other direction. Whatever the other company's summary says you committed to is their document.

This is where two records become a practical problem rather than a cosmetic one. Each summary is generated by a different model with a different template, tuned to what its owner cares about. A sales tool will pull out budget and timeline. A customer success tool will pull out risks and next steps. Months later, when someone says you promised a date, both sides will have a record that feels authoritative, and neither side can see the other's.

Do not try to win the archive war. Anything that has to bind both sides belongs in a message both sides receive: the follow up email, the shared channel, the updated proposal. Your own notes are what let you write that message quickly and accurately while the call is still fresh. They are not a substitute for it.

Anyone in the call can switch off every bot

Otter documents a chat command for removing its notetaker. Any participant can type it, including people without an Otter account, and the page warns that if there are multiple notetakers, the command removes all of them. So the person who wanted their own bot gone also removes yours, and your record of the call ends at that moment. Depending on the platform, the host or other participants can also remove a notetaker as a participant.

That is a reasonable control for the people being recorded. It also means a bot based record of an external call exists only as long as everyone on the other side tolerates it. Two or three bots in the participant list make that tolerance shorter, not longer, and they make every call start with the same small negotiation about whose bot is whose.

The duplication also reaches people before the call starts. Fathom notes that if several people from your organisation attend the same external meeting, attendees may currently receive more than one consent email, and says deduplication of those emails is in progress. Add the other company's own notices and one call can produce a small stack of emails before anyone has said a word.

What changes when capture happens on your own machine

Driffle records the audio your Mac is already playing and hearing. It does not join the call, so it does not appear in the participant list, there is no duplicate to remove, nobody has to admit it, and a chat command aimed at bots does not end your notes. There is no tie breaker either: your notes are visible only to you until you explicitly share them, and workspace admins only see what has been shared into shared folders. The privacy setting of a meeting is never decided by which colleague's sync fired first.

Audio is transcribed and discarded within about a minute. What Driffle keeps is the text and your notes, which you can then ask questions of across meetings, with each answer linking back to where it came from.

Be clear about what this does not change. The other company's bot still records you, and its record is still theirs. Because nothing announces Driffle to the room, telling people their words are being captured is your job rather than a bot's, and in some places the law makes that a requirement rather than a courtesy. Driffle also never starts by itself: it does not auto join or auto record, so a call you forget to start is a call with no notes. It is a direct download for Apple Silicon Macs only, Intel Mac, Windows and Linux are a request form for now, and summaries and AI chat run in the cloud, so it is not an offline or on-device product.

Five questions to ask a vendor before you buy

These take one support ticket or one demo call, and the answers are usually in the help centre already.

• Where does duplicate removal stop? If the answer is your workspace or your domain, picture your last ten external calls with two bots in each.
• When duplicates are removed inside the company, whose settings win? Organiser, widest sharer, first inviter or first admitted all produce different privacy outcomes on the same call.
• Can a team member stop their notes from being shared wider than they chose, and is that a setting you control or one you have to ask the vendor to enable?
• Does duplicate handling cover unscheduled calls and huddles, or only calendar events?
• What can someone on the other side do to your capture during the call, and do you find out when they do it?

The question to ask instead

Whether two notetakers can sit in the same meeting is settled: they can, and on most external calls they already do. The question that decides whether your tool works for you is whether your record of an external call depends on the other side's tools, the other side's patience and a tie breaker you never chose.

If you want notes from every call without adding another participant to it, Driffle is a Mac download at driffle.ai/download.