Can two AI notetakers join the same meeting?
Yes. Each participant can bring their own, so a five-person call can contain three notetakers from three vendors, each recording to a different cloud. The practical side effects are duplicate recordings under different retention policies, inflated participant counts, and bots that stay after the humans leave.
The bot-that-would-not-leave problem
Most notetakers decide the meeting is over by counting participants. When two vendors’ bots remain in an empty room, each sees another participant and each keeps recording — sometimes for hours. This is not hypothetical: Donna once sat in a call for two hours after every human left, because a rival notetaker was still there and the headcount said two. The fix was to classify other vendors’ notetakers as non-humans in the roster, confirm against caption silence, and add a plain silence backstop that needs no headcount at all.
Why it also corrupts the record
Notetaker bots appear in the participant list, so unless a tool filters them they show up in attendance timelines and participant counts as if they had attended the meeting. Reports then claim eight attendees for a five-person call, and “who was in the room” — which matters for a decision record — becomes unreliable. Donna excludes recognised notetaker bots from participant lists for exactly this reason.
Keeping a multi-vendor call tidy
Agree who is recording before the call rather than during it; one recording with a shareable read is almost always better than three. If several must attend, at least confirm each has a leave condition that does not depend on headcount, and check afterwards that the participant list in your report reflects humans only. And if a bot in your call has no obvious owner, ask — a notetaker nobody claims is a recording nobody governs.
Related questions
Does Donna count other bots as attendees?
No. Recognised notetaker bots are classified as non-attendees, so they neither pollute participant lists nor keep her in an otherwise empty room.
Will two bots produce two different reports?
Yes — each vendor produces its own record under its own retention policy, which is precisely the duplication problem. Sharing one read is cheaper and leaves fewer copies of a confidential conversation lying around.
Can I stop Donna mid-meeting?
Yes. An explicit stop makes her leave the call and still write the report from what was captured, rather than discarding the meeting.
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.