Is it legal to record a meeting with an AI notetaker?
Recording a meeting with an AI notetaker is legal in the same circumstances as any other recording: the rules depend on the participants’ jurisdictions, and range from one-party consent to all-party consent. A bot does not create a new legal category — but because it is visible in the participant list, disclosure is easier to evidence.
Consent, in the terms that actually matter
Some jurisdictions require only one participant to consent, some require everyone, and a call with participants in several places can be governed by the strictest rule in the room. Beyond recording law, personal data rules — GDPR in Europe, India’s DPDP Act, sectoral rules for health and finance — govern what you do with the recording afterwards: purpose, retention, access and deletion. This is general information, not legal advice; a multi-jurisdiction recording policy is worth twenty minutes of a lawyer’s time.
Why a visible bot is the safer shape
A notetaker that appears in the participant list, waits in the lobby and gets admitted by the host produces the disclosure trail on its own: everyone saw it, and the platform logged the admission. Covert capture — a recorder nobody can see — inverts that, which is why Donna has no hidden mode. Announcing her at the top of the call takes four seconds and settles the etiquette question that the legal question usually rides on.
The policy that keeps this simple
Working teams converge on the same short list: say at the start of the call that it is being recorded and why; name who owns the recording and where it lives; set a retention period and actually enforce it; keep sensitive categories — grievance conversations, medical disclosures, legal advice — off the record entirely; and give people a way to ask for a recording to be deleted. Running the notetaker yourself makes every line of that policy enforceable by you rather than by a vendor’s roadmap.
Related questions
Does Donna announce herself?
She appears in the participant list under a name you set and is admitted by the host — visible attendance, every time. Saying it out loud remains good practice, and no covert mode exists to make that optional.
Can a participant ask not to be recorded?
Yes, and the practical answer is to remove the bot for that call. Because Donna is your own deployment, you can also delete a specific meeting’s recording and report outright — deletion is your database and your disk, not a support ticket.
Is transcription treated differently from recording?
Often not — a transcript of a private conversation is generally treated as a record of it. Assume the same consent obligations apply to notes generated automatically as to the audio itself.
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.