What is an AI meeting bot?
An AI meeting bot is a software participant that joins a video call the way a person does, records the audio (and often the screen), transcribes the conversation with a speech-recognition model, and then generates notes, summaries, or deeper analysis. Most are cloud services; self-hosted bots like Donna run on your own server instead.
How is a meeting bot different from a recording app?
A recording app captures whatever your device hears, and only while you are present with it running. A meeting bot is an independent attendee: it gets the meeting link, joins from its own machine, appears in the participant list, and captures the call itself. That difference matters practically — a bot can attend when you cannot, and everyone in the room can see it is there.
What happens to the recording afterward?
This is the fork in the market. Cloud bots (Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, tl;dv, MeetGeek) upload the recording to the vendor’s servers, transcribe and analyze it there, and store the results under their retention policies. A self-hosted bot performs the same steps on infrastructure you control: Donna records to her own server’s disk, transcribes by calling Whisper large-v3 with your API key, analyzes with your DeepSeek key, and stores everything in your PostgreSQL database.
Do meeting bots need permission to join?
Yes. In Google Meet, a bot requests to join like any external guest and the host admits it — there is no covert mode. Recording-consent law still applies exactly as it would for a human pressing record, so the etiquette is simple: tell the room, same as always.
Related questions
Can everyone see an AI bot in the meeting?
Yes — a bot joins as a named participant in the list, and in Google Meet the host explicitly admits it. Donna is deliberately visible; covert recording is neither supported nor sensible.
Does an AI meeting bot speak in the call?
Notetaker bots, Donna included, attend silently: they record and observe but do not talk. The output arrives after the meeting as a transcript and report.
What is the main risk with AI meeting bots?
Data custody. Every cloud bot creates a copy of your conversation on a third party’s servers. Self-hosted bots eliminate that copy — which is the core reason Donna runs on your own VPS.
Put Donna in your next meeting
Donna deploys onto your own VPS in an afternoon: nginx, pm2, PostgreSQL, your API keys. Early access is open — tell us about your team and we’ll get her a seat at your table.
Request early access