Record Zoom without a bot joining your call

You can record Zoom without a bot. Daisy never joins the meeting — there is no extra attendee, no companion app inside the call, nothing for the host to admit or notice. Instead it records both sides through your own computer: your microphone for your voice, your system audio for everyone else. Acoustic echo cancellation keeps those two streams from bleeding into each other, so "who said what" stays clean. The whole capture runs locally on your machine.

Why bots are the default — and why that's a problem

Most meeting tools work by sending a bot to sit in the call. You paste a link, their service dials in as a participant, and a named attendee shows up in the roster. That bot streams the meeting audio out to a vendor's servers, where it's stored and processed under their terms.

It works, but it's a lot of exposure for a transcript. Everyone in the room can see the recorder joined. The audio leaves your control the moment it's captured. And on calls where a visible recorder is awkward — interviews, one-on-ones, sensitive deals — the bot itself changes the conversation. The recording is happening somewhere you can't see.

How botless capture works

Your computer already has the audio. When you're on a call, sound comes in through your microphone and goes out through your speakers or headset. Daisy taps both of those locally: it records your mic on one channel and your system output — the other participants — on another.

Echo cancellation does the cleanup. Without it, your own voice leaks into the system channel through your speakers and the diarization gets muddy. Daisy cancels that echo so each speaker lands on the right side. Nothing about this touches the meeting platform. There's no plugin, no bot account, no link to paste. You hit record on your machine, and your machine does the work.

Works with Zoom, Meet, Teams, Discord, phone calls

Because Daisy captures audio at the operating-system level rather than through any one app's API, the source doesn't matter. Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord, a phone call on speaker, a podcast you're recording in a browser tab — if it plays through your speakers and you're talking into your mic, Daisy records it. Same flow every time, no per-platform integration to set up.

Consent still matters

Botless does not mean secret. Recording-consent laws vary by jurisdiction — some places require all parties to agree, others only one — and following the rules where you record is your responsibility, not the tool's. Daisy makes the capture private and local; it does not make it legal on its own. Tell people when it makes sense to, and know the law that applies to your call.

What happens after the call

When you stop recording, everything runs on-device and free: Daisy transcribes the audio, labels speakers with on-device diarization, and indexes the text so you can search across past meetings. Diarization is always local and free, no matter how you transcribe. Audio lands on disk in open formats — .wav or .opus — and transcripts as plain markdown, so the files are yours to keep, move, or grep.

Live captions are the one piece that depends on your hardware, and it's a ladder, not a catch. Desktops and Apple Silicon Macs run them on-device. Lighter laptops can choose the heavier on-device path, bring a Deepgram realtime key for live captions only, or skip live captions entirely and take the full transcript at the end — which is identical either way.

Summaries, Q&A, and coaching need a language model, the only step that can reach off your machine, and only if you want it to. Point Daisy at a local LLM through Ollama or LM Studio and it stays fully private. Prefer the cloud? Bring your own key for OpenAI, Anthropic, or Groq. Or run none at all and use the transcript with a copy-paste prompt in whatever tool you already have. Daisy is private by default, with your choice to extend.

No account, ever. The license check works offline — one license covers three devices — and there's a 30-day trial with no signup. Builds run on Linux, Windows, and macOS (Apple Silicon .dmg). The recorder is on your machine, the files are on your disk, and nothing ever joined your call.