Advice on creating a meeting recording bot

So we’ve been asked to develop a zoom integration for a client who wants the ability for a bot to be able to be aware of zoom meetings via a calendar integration, join them automatically and dump a video file at the end of the meeting into a data store for analysis / review.

It seems as though the JS SDK is only designed to embed the react client and not suitable for use as a headless client with all the important code minified and obfuscated… is this assumption true?

Is it because this type of functionality conflicts with your pricing model / in-app functionality like the pro plan recording feature?

If you have any advice on upcoming features to help bot type users being able to join meetings and get a video/audio stream please let me know. Or if this type of use case is deliberately not supported it would be good to understand that as well.

Looking at how other SaaS products get zoom recordings we saw that there are some people who do this type of thing already but we don’t know how they do it eg gong.io seem to use a bot user to record meetings. Any advice on how they do this?

I spent some time on this today and was able to grab a video stream of the canvas and record it using RecordRTC but having trouble getting the audio stream element. Any tips?

Hey @zemadfrenchman, thanks for posting and using Zoom!

Before we get into recording bots, are you aware Zoom has this functionality built in?

Meetings can automatically be recorded, then uploaded to the Zoom Cloud, or if using our API, a cloud provider of your choice.

Thanks,
Tommy

Yes I am aware of this feature but it is for pro licenses only. The goal is to make a zero-touch process for the users, which would only be possible if the users all have pro licenses. I know how we could build the integration to use cloud recording with the REST API to turn the setting on and get the recordings. But this approach still has that limitation of being pro-only.

If this is deliberately part of your business model and you want to encourage pro licenses for recording capabilities I totally understand and respect that. Using the web SDK was a way to have free users be able to have a zero-touch automatic recording capability as well, by having a bot join the meeting and handle it for them without them having to think about uploading files or anything.

Hey @zemadfrenchman,

Obviously yes this is part of our business model, but sure it is possible to record meetings in other ways. Also we have a built in notification and user opt in system so the user is aware they are being recorded. Make sure your app abides to our privacy policy and app marketplace agreement or it could be taken down.

In my opinion it would be easier and in most cases cheaper to just have Pro Licenses, rather than to build and maintain an entire recording software suite.

An additional benefit of the Pro License is the ability to livestream and record meetings that way too.

Thanks,
Tommy

@zemadfrenchman Hi, I have been also asked to develop a zoom integration for a client. Even if we get video stream, we need a browser to attend meeting right, how can we attend zoom meeting programmatically like in linux/server, Can you please guide me ?

@zemadfrenchman, thanks for your post. If you can build that type of recording bot. I m interested. How can I contact you?

Hey @Austin1, @krishna9291492088,

Currently bots cannot join Zoom meetings programmatically. Only actual users.

Thanks,
Tommy