How to use Zoom meeting/chat to allow message passing between external applications?

A while ago Skype had an integration feature where another desktop app could register with a running Skype client and exchange messages with its counterpart attaching to a remote Skype client. The external app could be a game of chess, for example. The messages sent back and forth over the Skype session would execute moves of pieces on the boards while the players talked to each other. These messages were very much like chat but didn’t originate on the keyboard, were not visible to users, and would be pushed to the external app’s message handler.
I’ve been looking at webhooks and the chatbot sample over the weekend but have not yet figured out how to enable such chat between game-like apps started by 2 remote users of Zoom. We are talking about chat generalization here. Any help would be much appreciated.

Hey @jacek.ambroziak, thanks for posting and using Zoom!

This is interesting! I don’t believe this would be possible in in meeting chat because we do not have APIs for that.

However, you could totally do this with a Zoom Chatbot. Here are some helpful links to get you started:

https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/guides/chatbots/installation-and-authentication
https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/guides/chatbots/build-a-chatbot

Thanks,
Tommy

Tommy,

thank you for the prompt response! Yesterday I went through the exercise of building an Unsplash chatbot per your tutorial instructions. Very interesting. However, in this case user types text, chatbot receives that text, and replies back to the chat with more text/images/URLs/etc. What I want to integrate is, say, a game of chess: I have my board – UI displayed by my app, and you have your board. I make a move with a mouse, and a message gets sent over to your computer whereupon the same move gets reflected on your board. Then you take your turn, etc. It is like a chat but the endpoints are the chess app client instances. And messages are not in natural language, but in JSON or better yet binary.
How exactly to set up this communication I don’t yet know, but there would be a way to do that with an external server relaying messages and with webhooks (I guess). Trouble is, that server would see a lot of traffic – it would be better to exchange messages peer to peer. I was hoping to somehow utilize the connection two Zoom clients use to send video/audio/chat/files between one another.

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Hey @jacek.ambroziak,

Cool to hear you went through the Unsplash Chatbot Tutorial!

I get what you are saying, currently the peer to peer messaging you are envisioning is not supported.

However, I’m sure you could figure out a way to do it with Chatbot Buttons and Attachment Message types! :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Tommy

Tommy,

my interactive whiteboard now works. It is similar to Skype for Business has, but is richer

Now I want to integrate it deeper w/ Zoom.
Pls shout if you’d like to see a demo

Cheers,
–Jacek

Happy to hear you got it working! :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Tommy