Allow chatbots to join meeting chats

Feature Requests
#21

So, I really like this idea and was already trying to see if it was possible, since polls currently need to be done in scheduled meetings and are difficult to update after a meeting has started.

There are many times that our group has impromptu story pointing that we do on various Jira tickets and it would be nice to be able to:

  1. easily pull up information about the Jira ticket in the chat window (could be 1 in meeting chatbot) and
  2. instantly create a planning poker poll (another in meeting chatbot, e.g. /ppoker XY-1234 Some Jira Issue Name would become poll: Question XY-1234 Some Jira Issue Name, Answers 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc), or a chatbot for any poll for that matter. Not being able to do impromptu polls without constantly switching to the browser, etc, is just a painful experience. If the in meeting chatbot is not an option, I’d love to just have a way to do impromptu polls even if the meeting is not a scheduled meeting. I guess I’ll see if that issue is already out there or add it myself.
1 Like
#22

Hey @chris.strolia-davis,

Good suggestion! Since we don’t support “In Meeting Chat” yet, you could implement this in Zoom Chat by building a Chatbot. Then everyone in the Chat Channel can see and collaborate.

Thanks,
Tommy

#23

+1
Feature would be a life changer.

1 Like
#24

Want to work with the university of michigan to provide real time (in meeting) messages to professors.
Allowing bots in the in meeting chat would be huge!!!

Any updates on this?

#25

Same here very interested in this. Working from Simon Fraser University in Canada, so we are holding lectures through zoom and we are constantly getting questions that we don’t want to take the time to answer during lecture in the chat, having an in meeting chat bot would be massive.

#26

@tommy, this would be a useful feature for me as well. I’d like to add a use-case here… that of an official corporation meeting (HOAs, professional associations, non-profit boards, etc.) that needs to observe some type of parliamentary procedure (NAP’s Robert’s Rules, AIP’s Standard Code, etc.) A chat-bot would allow attendees to request to speak and to vote… all monitored by the chatbot with feedback to the meeting chair and/or participants.

“Raise Hand” is a nice feature, but if 2 or more people Raise Hand between the time you last looked at the participant window and “just now”, you don’t know who was first… THAT person gets the floor (though there are other rules that might supersede that determination).

“Polling” is nice, informally, but the Host doesn’t get to participate (might not be an issue if the Chair is the Host, but if a member of the assembly/board/etc is the Host, they have a right to vote). Further, there may be guests in attendance who do not have voting rights. A chat-bot could be provided with “who is authorized to vote”.

My current (new-guy to the Zoom API, admittedly) understanding is that the Yes/No and Raise Hand events are not individually capturable from an API etc.

In the vast majority of cases, only the Host has an account (or many one or two have accounts not linked to the Host’s account). using “Zoom Chat” isn’t a viable option.

Thanks for keeping this feature open as a possibility.
(Note: at this post, you mention that this is possible… for a non-meeting-attached chatbot to join a meeting and participate – but that nobody has done it yet that you know of. I might consider giving this a try… but it’s a bit deep for my first Zoom interface!)

#27

Another use-case: online gaming. As with platforms like Discord, bots serve several useful purposes - reference lookups, dice-rolling, initiative tracking, etc.

We use Zoom almost exclusively for online adaptations of tabletop RPGs. Bots are the key missing feature. There is, for example, a DND dice-rolling app for Zoom Chat - but without the capacity to be both run and read by all participating players, it’s fairly useless.

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#29

Wait. So chatbots can’t be in meetings? This would would be a great feature for Zoom. You could become a virtual operating system. Allowing a “bot” to do things in a meeting takes you to a new level.

After reading a bit more, I think something similar can be accomplished with a slash command. Can I make a slash command that allows a user to use a webhook and get a result ? (example: foobar mail calls a webhook called foobar and passes in the text “mail”) Can I display the result in chat or at least in the web browser for the initiator of the slash command and they can share screen?

#30

Using a webhook to display results in a separate browser is actually a nice workaround. Clunkier than being able to post directly into the chat, but better than nothing! It sounds like this would be possible based on what Tommy posted in another thread here, but it sounds like it has never been tested by anyone: Ability for the chatbot to join a meeting

#31

Clarification. We can not have any interaction all with users while in meetings? So we can’t use the meeting chat. We also can’t have slash commands? We also can’t even send everyone chat messages?

#32

If you want to work on/study this together, let me know.

#33

digging into it a little more, it doesn’t look like there are any events related to the in-meeting chat: https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/api-reference/webhook-reference/meeting-events

So I think no matter what, you’re stuck using the separate chat channel.

@tommy are there any plans to add an event for the in-meeting chat?

#34

Please answer.

Can I have slash commands in a zoom meeting that trigger a webhook?

#35

I agree! I have an idea that would help my school tremendously! The teacher constantly has to link the slides when someone joins. What if a student can type “/link” and the bot could send the preset link to the chat.

Even better, attendance is a huge issue. What if students can roll call themselves. “/here” can add their name to a list which is later on handed to the teacher.