A Microsoft Teams notetaker that joins as a participant

TrackHeros joins Microsoft Teams meetings as a participant: a named entry in the meeting roster that records, transcribes, and files the notes under the right client. It joins from the meeting link, found on a connected Microsoft 365, Outlook or Google calendar or pasted in by you, so it works for meetings you host and for meetings a client's organiser set up. This page is for professionals who take client calls on Teams. Google Meet has its own page.

What does the bot do in a Teams meeting?

• It appears in the roster under its own name. The default is "TrackHeros Notetaker", changeable per client: plain text, one line, no emoji.
• It can post a short greeting in the meeting chat when it joins, if you set one for the client. Plain text only: Teams reads angle brackets as formatting and Google Meet shows them as written, so the greeting refuses them and the same message works in both.
• It records the call and collects the platform's live captions, which carry the real speaker names.
• It listens and records; it does not speak.

Everyone in the meeting can see it, which is the point. Tell people it is coming.

How does it find the meeting?

Three ways, and the direct one is a connected Microsoft calendar. Connect the Microsoft 365 or Outlook account the invitations arrive in, assign it to a client, and every Teams meeting on that account's default calendar is picked up on its own. A Google calendar that carries a Teams invitation works too, and so does a link pasted into TrackHeros with the client picked by hand.

Route	When it fits
A connected Microsoft 365 or Outlook calendar	The client gave you a Microsoft 365 account, or invitations reach an Outlook.com address
A connected Google calendar	The Teams invitation reached a Google account, often forwarded
A pasted link, or the whole invitation	No connected calendar carries it

The Microsoft connection asks for read-only calendar access and nothing else: no mail, no files, no contacts. Sync is push-based, through a Microsoft Graph subscription the app renews before it expires, so new invitations, reschedules and cancellations arrive on their own. The guide to connecting Google and Outlook calendars to one notetaker walks through both.

Teams meetings still reach calendars in awkward ways. A client forwards their organiser's invitation. The link is buried inside another invitation's body, wrapped in boilerplate. The calendar entry has no conference data at all, only a paragraph of text with the link somewhere in it. TrackHeros looks in the conference data, the location field and the free text of the description, and it recognises a Teams link even when it sits inside a forwarded invitation that also carries a Google Meet link from an earlier round of forwarding. It also unwraps Microsoft Safe Links, the rewritten addresses some Microsoft 365 organisations wrap around links in invitations, so a wrapped Teams link is still recognised. If there is a Teams link anywhere in the invitation, it is found.

How does it work?

Step	What happens
Link	A Teams link is found on an invitation in a connected Microsoft or Google calendar, or you paste it yourself.
Decision	TrackHeros decides whether to join: the setting for this meeting, then this recurring series, then your account default, which is on.
Join	About two minutes before the start, the bot joins from the link under the client's bot name.
Lobby	If the meeting has a lobby, it waits there until someone admits it.
Record	It records the call and collects captions with speaker names.
Notes	After the call, an audio pass over the recording produces the authoritative transcript, and the notes are written and filed under the client.

Meetings that started more than ten minutes ago are not chased.

What about the lobby?

Teams meetings usually have a lobby, and who waits in it is the organiser's decision — often everyone from outside the organiser's organisation. The bot arrives from outside, so expect it to wait. It stays in the lobby until someone admits it, exactly as a human guest would, and it cannot admit itself. If your client organises the meeting, tell them the notetaker will be asking to join and to let it in. If you organise it, admit it yourself, or set your meeting options so that guests do not have to wait. There is a longer answer in can a notetaker join a meeting you do not host.

What does the transcript look like?

The same as on Google Meet. The captions the bot collects during the call carry the real speaker names and are the scaffold. After the call, an audio pass over the recording produces the authoritative transcript — the one that copes with a sentence that starts in German, Spanish or Arabic and ends in English, rendered into English line by line. A line that cannot be attributed to a speaker is labelled Unknown rather than guessed.

Teams captions, like Meet's, decode one spoken language per meeting, so they are not trusted alone. Each meeting's language is worked out from the meeting itself, from close to 100 spoken languages, the same way on both platforms and with nothing to set. The notes are written in English by default, or in Arabic, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Ukrainian or Indonesian if you choose one for the account, the client, the series or the meeting. See automatic language detection and every language TrackHeros recognises.

The notes have the same fixed shape too: summary, agenda, discussion by topic, decisions, milestones, and action items with owners and due dates, laid out in the client's minutes template and exportable as a PDF or copied for email, with headings and dates in the notes language — see meeting minutes.

When does it join, and what if it fails?

Auto-join is on by default. It can be turned off for one meeting, for a whole recurring series, or for your account, and the most specific setting wins; the app shows which one decided. If a join fails — the bot was never admitted, the link changed, the meeting ended before it got in — retry with one click. The app refuses to send a second bot into a meeting that already has one, so a retry never produces two notetakers in the same call.

Why does the connected calendar matter here?

Because it decides the client. Each connected account, Microsoft or Google, belongs to exactly one client, so an invitation that lands on it is already filed under that client before the bot joins, and a Teams meeting with Client A can never end up in Client B's workspace. If the same meeting sits on a Microsoft and a Google calendar of the same client, it is recognised as one meeting and gets one bot. How accounts are connected, and what happens to invitations that have no client, is on the every-calendar page.

Which Outlook calendar does it read?

Only the account's default calendar. Secondary calendars you created, calendars colleagues shared with you and subscribed calendars are not read, so a Teams meeting that lives only on one of those needs its link pasted in. More in which Outlook calendar the notetaker watches.

Two things can stop a connection. Some Microsoft 365 organisations require an administrator to approve apps, and TrackHeros then tells you to ask your Microsoft 365 administrator. A work account with no Exchange mailbox has no calendar, and is refused when you connect it. Disconnecting stops the sync, but Microsoft offers no way for an app to revoke its own permission, so the app tells you to remove TrackHeros from your Microsoft account's app permissions yourself.