Help on How to Start Building Live Transcription App within Zoom

API and Webhooks
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1

I am struggling to begin creating a zoom app that would essentially transcribe meeting audio live and push this audio to an external API. I am not sure where to start; whether I should use meeting sdk, video sdk, zoom apps, oauth, server-to-server oauth.

The idea is that I would like to have this application transcribe audio from every meeting the user is a part of, and after every meeting, push this transcription to an external API.

2

Hey @parthasarathy.madhav , Unfortunately, there are no direct API endpoints to access the real-time transcript. 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
  • Not compliant with Zoom’s recording policies

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

Recall.ai is 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!