# Access live transcript during a meeting through an API

**URL:** <https://devforum.zoom.us/t/access-live-transcript-during-a-meeting-through-an-api/80603>\
**Category:** Meetings\
**Created:** [December 21, 2022, 5:28pm UTC](https://devforum.zoom.us/t/access-live-transcript-during-a-meeting-through-an-api/80603 "2022-12-21T17:28:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![kiran.bihari](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/b5a626/32.png) [@kiran.bihari](https://devforum.zoom.us/u/kiran.bihari)\
**Post date:** [December 21, 2022, 5:28pm UTC](https://devforum.zoom.us/t/access-live-transcript-during-a-meeting-through-an-api/80603/1 "2022-12-21T17:28:08Z")

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I am trying to find a way to access the items in a live transcript as they are being written. I would like to use an API/Webhook to send each individual line (along with the participant who spoke it and the datetime stamp). I know there are ways to get this information after the meeting has been ended but is there a way to do this while the meeting is in progress?

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**Author:** ![MaxM](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/devforum.zoom.us/maxm/32/42303_2.png) [@MaxM](https://devforum.zoom.us/u/MaxM)\
**Post date:** [December 21, 2022, 11:21pm UTC](https://devforum.zoom.us/t/access-live-transcript-during-a-meeting-through-an-api/80603/2 "2022-12-21T23:21:29Z")

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We don’t have a real time API for transcription unfortunately. However, you can stream the meeting or use our [Meeting SDK for raw data](https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/sdk/native-sdks/windows/raw-data/)

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**Author:** ![amanda-recallai](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/devforum.zoom.us/amanda-recallai/32/44747_2.png) [@amanda-recallai](https://devforum.zoom.us/u/amanda-recallai)\
**Post date:** [January 5, 2023, 3:19pm UTC](https://devforum.zoom.us/t/access-live-transcript-during-a-meeting-through-an-api/80603/3 "2023-01-05T15:19:33Z")

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@kiran.bihari, like @MaxM said, there is no API for real-time transcription. However, here are 4 other ways you could explore to create a real-time transcript from a Zoom meeting.

## 1. Use the Zoom RTMP live-streaming API

**Pros:**

- Doesn’t require any 3rd party services
- Lighter weight than building and running a Zoom bot

**Cons:**

- Needs to initiated on a per-meeting basis
- You need to set up an RTMP server to receive the data, which requires engineering effort to deploy, scale, and monitor
- Participants can get spooked by the “live” badge that appears in the meeting (even if it’s a privte meeting)
- No speaker separation

## 2. Build a desktop app to capture users’ computer audio

**Pros:**

- One of the most cost effective solutions

**Cons:**

- You need to build a separate app for Windows, Mac and Linux
- It is especially difficult to tap into computer audio on Mac
- App runs on users’ computer so it can slow their computer down/make computer fans go off
- No speaker separation

## 3. Build a Zoom bot

**Pros:**

- Can get the separate audio streams per participant for perfect diarization / speaker labels

**Cons:**

- It is very heavy-weight as you would need to spin up multiple servers to run the Zoom client for the bot
- Running infrastructure for Zoom bot costs more than live streaming.
- You need to encode the raw video and audio yourself

## 4. Use Recall.ai

It’s a unified API that lets you send meeting bots to video conferencing platforms to capture the audio,  
video and transcription in real-time.

**Pros:**

- Handles spinning up the servers, and providing the real-time raw audio/transcript so all you interact with is a simple API.
- Works on any Zoom plan (including Free)
- Gets speaker diarization / speaker labels
- Works agnostic of meeting platform

**Cons:**

- It’s another 3rd party service in your stack

Let me know if you have any questions!