Admin approvals of Zoom video meeting bots Apps

Zoom Apps Meeting bots
1

Hello! I’m creating a Zoom bot that will join the meeting and process (record) video for further transcription and analysis. I know I need to create a Zoom APP and go through the app review process.

According to:

I understand that once my Zoom App is published, most of the accounts (companies) will need their admin to approve the App and only then the company users can use the App, right?

2

@tomasz.fiechowski, thanks for reaching out and I’m happy to help!

You don’t actually need to create a “Zoom App” if you’re building a Zoom bot – you need to create a “Zoom Meeting SDK App”, which is a slightly different thing.

What is a Zoom App

Zoom Apps (which your support article is referring to) are the apps that appear in the Zoom sidebar, and show a UI for users to interact with during the meeting. These do need to be approved by a user or an administrator, however they are completely separate from a bot.

What is a Zoom Meeting SDK App

For a Zoom Bot, you’ll need API credentials from a “Zoom Meeting SDK App”. Those do not require users or administrators to approve before it’s able to join a call.

How to build a bot using the Meeting SDK

To build a Zoom bot, you need the Linux Meeting SDK. Here is how to use it to use it to build a meeting bot.

  1. Spin up a server. We recommend AWS, GCP, or Digital Ocean.
  2. Use either the Linux Zoom SDK to launch an instance of the Zoom client.
  3. Once you have the Zoom SDK launched, and use the Raw Data functionality to extract the video and audio streams.
  4. This will return the video in I420 raw frames and audio in PCM 16LE raw format, so you’ll need to encode the audio and video yourself afterwards.
  5. Once you have one instance of this working, you’ll need to scale this across several servers if you want to run multiple bots simultaneously, which is required to have bots for multiple meetings.

Finally, another option is Recall.ai. It’s a simple 3rd party API that lets you use meeting bots to get raw audio/video from meetings and interact with participants without you needing to spend months to build, scale and maintain these bots.

Let me know if you have any questions!