Let the Brieflee notetaker into your Teams meetings

What your organizers see

When the Brieflee notetaker joins a meeting your company hosts, Teams recognises it as a bot. It does not go straight in. It waits in the lobby under Suspected threats, marked Unverified, until the organizer admits it. The meeting’s own lobby settings do not change this.

This is Teams working as Microsoft intends. Its default setting asks the organizer to approve bots from outside the company, and it applies to note-taking services in general, not only to Brieflee.

Admitting it in a meeting

No admin change is needed for this. In the meeting:

1. Open People.
2. Find Brieflee Notetaker under Suspected threats.
3. Select the check mark next to it. Teams reminds you that it is a bot before it lets it in.

Organizers and co-organizers can admit it. Presenters can too if the meeting’s Who can admit from the lobby setting allows it. Nobody else in the meeting can.

The external bot setting

If your organizers should not have to admit the notetaker every time, a Teams administrator can change how Teams treats bots for them. The setting is in a meeting policy, so it can apply to everyone or only to the people who use Brieflee.

1. In the Teams admin center, go to Meetings, then Meeting policies.
2. Choose the policy assigned to the people who organize the meetings Brieflee should record, or create one for them.
3. Under Meeting join & lobby, find Manage external bots and their access to meetings.
4. Change it from When detected, require approval before joining (the default) to Do not detect bots, then select Save.

The same change in PowerShell:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity "Policy name" -ExternalBotAccessMode AllowAllBots

One Microsoft page calls this value AllowBots. To see the names your version accepts, run Get-Help Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Parameter ExternalBotAccessMode. To go back to the default, use RequireApprovalWhenDetected.

Please read this before you change it. Do not detect bots applies to every bot from outside your company that joins meetings these people organize, not only Brieflee. Microsoft recommends keeping detection on unless you have a business reason. A policy for only the people who use Brieflee keeps the change small.

With detection off, the notetaker joins like any other guest. Your usual lobby settings then apply to it: if guests wait in the lobby in your meetings, it waits there too, under Waiting in lobby. Changes to meeting policies can take up to 24 hours to reach everyone.

Guests must be able to join

The notetaker joins as a guest without a Microsoft account, so Teams counts it as an anonymous participant. Whatever you choose above, anonymous participants must be allowed into your organizers’ meetings:

• For the whole company: in the Teams admin center, go to Meetings, then Meeting settings. Under Participants, Anonymous users can join a meeting must be on.
• For the people who use Brieflee: in their meeting policy, under Meeting join & lobby, Anonymous users can join a meeting unverified must be on.
• In each meeting: the organizer’s meeting option Require unverified participants to verify their info before joining must stay off. It is off unless someone turns it on. The notetaker has no mailbox, so it cannot receive the code Teams would send.

The per-person setting in PowerShell:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity "Policy name" -AllowAnonymousUsersToJoinMeeting $true

If your company blocks bots

Teams can also turn detected bots away completely (BlockDetectedBots in PowerShell). If your company uses it, the notetaker cannot join your meetings, and that is your decision to make.

Your people can still use Brieflee without a notetaker in the call:

• The Brieflee desktop app for Windows and Mac records the meeting from their own computer. Nothing joins the call.
• Recording from the browser in Chrome or Edge captures the meeting’s sound without adding anyone to the call. On Windows it works with the Teams app too; on a Mac, only with a meeting open in a browser tab.
• Importing a recording they made in Teams works for any meeting, after it ends.

Teams Town halls and webinars are events, not meetings. The notetaker can join one only when the event is open to the public.

About the notetaker

• Its name. It appears as Brieflee Notetaker. An Enterprise workspace can give it its own name and picture, which always keeps the word Notetaker.
• When it joins. One, three or five minutes before a meeting on a connected calendar starts, as set in that person’s Brieflee account, or at once when someone adds it to a meeting already running.
• What it tells the meeting. Once admitted, it posts a notice in the meeting chat saying the meeting is recorded and transcribed by Brieflee AI, with a link to our privacy policy.
• If nobody admits it. It leaves the lobby after about 15 minutes and nothing is recorded.
• When it leaves. When the meeting ends, when it is the only one left in it, or after five minutes in which nobody speaks.