Can an AI notetaker attend a meeting without me?
Yes, if it is a bot rather than a device recorder. A bot joins from its own browser with the meeting link, so it can attend a call you skip entirely — typically triggered by a calendar feed or a manual start. The host still admits it, and bot-free tools cannot do this at all.
How unattended attendance actually works
The bot needs two things: the meeting link, and permission to enter. Donna gets the link from your calendar feed — a secret iCal URL you paste once, which requires no third-party OAuth app in your Workspace — or from a meeting you start by hand in the dashboard. She opens the link in a real browser, requests to join under her name, waits in the lobby and records once admitted. If nobody admits her, nothing happens, which is the correct failure mode.
What you get from a meeting you did not attend
The same read as any other meeting, and it is worth more here because you have no memory to fall back on. The report opens with a plain What Happened section written for someone who was not there, then decisions with trade-offs, verbatim commitments with owners and timestamps, and the open threads. The transcript is searchable with real speaker names, so the ten seconds where your name came up is findable without watching an hour of video.
The etiquette of sending a bot instead of a person
Sending a notetaker to a meeting you are skipping is a social act, not just a technical one. Say so in advance — “I cannot make it, my notetaker will be there, I will read it after” — and nobody minds. Sending a bot to a small meeting nobody knew about is how organisations end up with blanket anti-bot policies. Coverage is a good reason; surveillance is not, and the difference is visible from the invitation.
Related questions
Does auto-join need Google OAuth?
No. Donna reads a secret iCal feed URL, so calendar auto-join works without granting a third-party app access to your Google account — which also means an admin app-restriction policy does not block it.
What if the meeting is cancelled or nobody joins?
She waits, does not get admitted or finds an empty room, and leaves — with a silence backstop as a second safeguard. No report is generated for a meeting that never happened.
Will she leave when the meeting ends?
Yes, and on several independent signals: the call ending, the roster emptying of humans, and prolonged silence. Other vendors’ notetakers left in the room do not count as humans — a lesson learned from her sitting in a call with a rival bot long after everyone else had gone.
Put Donna in your next meeting
Access is open — sign in with your Google account and she’s in your dashboard in minutes. Rolling out to a whole team, or want a hand with the server setup? We’re glad to help.