Which AI Notetakers Record by Default? Only Two Will Say

Here's the trap. Someone on the sales team installs a notetaker, it connects to their calendar, and three weeks later it is sitting in customer calls that nobody decided it should attend. Then your general counsel asks whether the customer was told, and you go looking for the answer in the vendor's documentation.

Of sixteen tools, two tell you which auto-join setting a new account starts on. The rest publish the full menu of options and never say which one is selected. That is the fact your rollout turns on, and most of the recording and coaching category does not print it.

It is like buying a car where every brochure lists the possible gearbox settings and none says which gear it is delivered in. You can find out, but only by driving it.

So this page reports what each tool does before anyone configures anything: whether it joins every meeting, whether the other party sees or hears that it is there, and whether an admin can force either. Where a vendor does not say, that is recorded as unknown rather than guessed, because a wrong default here is worse than a blank one.

Which tools admit what they do by default?

Two, in their own words.

Fireflies: "By default, Fireflies is set to join all meetings with a web-conf link." It also does not need the rep in the room. Asked whether it can record without you attending, its help centre answers yes, provided the bot was invited and the platform admits guest bots.

Chorus is the more conservative of the two and the more explicit. It names its shipped rule as "a default setting", states that "by default, Chorus does not join video calls for your internal meetings", and adds that it "will not join meetings that are organized by your prospects/customers". That last exclusion is unique in this group.

Everyone else documents the choice without naming the shipped value. Fathom lists four options. Otter lists five. Avoma documents the admin rule set and the member setup flow. Grain describes its meeting-type rules across four separate articles. None of them says which boxes are ticked when you sign up. Attention comes closest and gets it wrong in an instructive way: its docs say "keep all four boxes checked so Attention joins every call", without ever naming the four boxes.

Does the other person know they are being recorded?

Almost every vendor documents that a bot appears in the participant list. Almost none ships an actual notice to the other party switched on. Those are different things and the gap between them is where the legal exposure sits.

Fireflies is the most candid about the posture, describing its own model as opt-out consent: users are treated as content to be recorded unless they object, and the bot joins automatically.

Which tools can record with nothing visible at all?

Four, and in three cases the silent mode is the same product on the same subscription as the visible one. Turning on a notetaker with a consent modal does not mean your team is using it.

• Grain. Bot Capture is a visible participant with a consent modal that participants must accept. Desktop Capture, same subscription, states plainly: "There is no in-meeting consent mechanism, you are responsible for informing participants and obtaining consent."
• Fathom. Its newer bot-free experience captures inside the rep's own desktop app. Nothing joins the call, so nothing appears in the participant list.
• Fireflies. Asked whether the bot can be hidden, it answers no, then names the workaround itself: for hidden capture, use the Chrome extension on Google Meet. The vendor's own phrasing.
• Trellus. A browser extension that attaches to the WebRTC audio of your dialer. There is no per-call step and no channel through which the person called could learn it is there.

Can an admin actually enforce anything?

This is the question that decides whether a policy is a policy or a request, and the answers spread further than any other column here.

• Avoma is strongest. Org-wide rules can be locked, and its docs are explicit that member-level overrides do not apply when a rule is locked. It publishes a four-level consent ladder up to "Permission required", where a participant who declines disables recording for that session. The top two levels are plan-gated.
• Clari Copilot and Chorus both let an admin block named domains in a way a rep cannot toggle around. Chorus states it plainly: if a blocked address is on the invite, no matter who else is on it, it will not record.
• Otter can lock auto-join workspace-wide, on Enterprise only. Forcing disclosure across your team is a contract tier, not a setting.
• Attention can force recording off but not disclosure on. Seat type controls capture, but the in-call compliance message can only be enabled by Attention itself through an account manager.
• Trellus is the outlier. The only documented off switch sits on each rep's own settings page. No admin force-off and no admin force-disclosure appears anywhere on its domain, and its terms state it "makes no representations or warranties with respect to call recording" while asserting that compliance features exist.

Which of these are not really notetakers?

Five tools get filed in this category and answer a different question, or none:

• Second Nature records the rep practising against an AI persona, on webcam. No customer is ever present, so the consent question does not arise. The employee-monitoring question does.
• Hyperbound is not practice-only, and it is routinely described as though it were. It ships its own call recorder and ingests from Gong, Chorus, Zoom and Teams to score real customer calls. Its privacy policy never uses the word recording.
• Observe.AI and Convin are contact-centre tools that ingest from your phone system rather than joining meetings. Whether the caller hears a disclosure is a property of your CCaaS, not of these products. Both help centres were gated when we checked, so their admin controls are genuinely unknown.
• Rilla records in-person field conversations from a phone app the rep carries. Its contract makes you warrant that every rep is trained to obtain consent first, and that clause is carved out of the liability cap and carries an indemnity. Rilla states it "will not be physically present during such recordings and is therefore unable to ensure that consent is legally obtained".

What should you actually do before rolling one out?

Four steps, in order, and the first one takes ten minutes:

• Create a trial account and look at the settings screen before changing anything. For fourteen of these sixteen tools that is the only way to learn the shipped default, because the documentation does not contain it. Screenshot what you find.
• Ask the vendor in writing whether the recording notice is on by default and whether an admin can force it. For Attention the honest answer is that only the vendor can enable it; for Otter it costs an Enterprise contract. Both are cheaper to learn now.
• Check whether a silent capture mode exists on the plan you are buying. Grain, Fathom, Fireflies and Avoma all have one, and enabling the visible mode does not disable the other.
• If you have staff or customers in all-party-consent states, make disclosure a locked setting rather than a training item. Avoma, Clari Copilot and Chorus are the three that can enforce it against a rep who would rather not. Our notes on compliant sales tooling cover the European side of the same question.

The answer to the question in the title is Fireflies and Chorus. Fireflies joins everything and says so; Chorus stays out of internal meetings and out of anything your customer organised, and says that too. For the other fourteen the honest answer is that the vendor will not tell you, and the settings screen on a trial account is the documentation.