Send message to live meeting

Is there a way to send a message to a live meeting using the Rest API?

For example, a meeting was sheduled programmatically via the API. Later, the host starts the meeting and is waiting for the other party to join. Our application, the one that scheduled the meeting, learns that the other party will not be joining or will be late. I want to send an appropriate message to the host, in-meeting.

The message could be via the meeting’s chat or some other in-meeting message facility.

Thanks,

Cam

Hi @cam.woods,

Currently we do not have this functionality available. But you can create an implementation at your end, where if the participant decides not to attend a meeting, you can send an email to the host notifying him of the same.

Thanks

Could I use the Zoom Chat API and send a message to the host user? If so, would that message show up in-meeting?

@cam.woods the message would show up in his zoom client. If he has enabled notifications, he can see it on his screen.

Thanks

I would also like to be able to send a server generated message to a live meeting with a REST API. Use case is to give elapsed or remaining time. We use a server generated end meeting API call to end the conference at a predetermined time. I’d like to give an in client visual warning before that happens. Email is not an option and not reliable.

@asprague,

Although you cannot send in meeting messages, you can use the Send Message API to send a message to the participant that his meeting would be ending. Please note that the user should be logged in to the Zoom Client to see the message.

Thanks,
Ojus

I need a way to post a message to all participants in an existing meeting while the meeting is active. It looks like the messages above indicate this is not possible with the current APIs, but I find that hard to understand, being such a basic operation. Is this true and is so, does anyone have a suggested alternative method?

Hey @steven.miller, welcome to our devfourm!

Currently the only way to do this would be through the custom closed caption endpoint:

Thanks,
Tommy

What I am really trying to do is to post a link (URL) to all of the meeting participants, so I don’t think closed caption would work. I was thinking it might be possible to get the list of all the current meeting participants and iterate through the list to send individual messages to each. If a message is sent to a user that is in an active meeting, where would that message appear? In the meeting chat?

Hey @steven.miller,

Unfortunately at this time it is not possible to send “In Meeting Chat” messages via the API.

A work around would be sending the message in Zoom Chat via a Chatbot.

Thanks,
Tommy

Even I am disappointed to find that there is no API to send a message from client to host since we are planning to use a third party video streaming and still want to maintain zoom chat

Hey @kurapati.muralikrish,

This is something we plan on having in the future.

Stay updated here: https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/changelog

Thanks,
Tommy

I also need to send a message to all active meeting participants to notify them about the remaining time before the meeting will end. The meeting will be ended via API. After spending lot of time going through the API docs, I finally found this thread with a large dose of hope, just to realise that it’s not possible.
The fact that there is no way to notify users about the remaining time is really a deal breaker for a fixed time meetings, since Zoom on it’s own doesn’t offer any coundown timer and restricting meeting duration.

@asprague I have exactly the same use case. Have you found any way to notify meeting participants about the remaining time?

Hey @bartosz.blimke,

This feature is valid, and I will bring it up to the team.

Thanks,
Tommy

Thank you @tommy, I appreciate it!

We are currently trying to pick a technology for a fixed duration video meetings, and the ability to alert all participants about the remaining time is crucial. Otherwise Zoom seems to be an ideal solution.
We don’t necessarily need ability to send messages to a meeting chat, but since Zoom client doesn’t support any other way to display countdown timer or send notifications, I thought about it as a workaround.

I know you guys are super busy these days and probably have priorities, but there is something that can be done, it would be great to understand some rough timeline of when the most basic functionality can be added e.g 1 month, 3 months, 12 months?

Hey @bartosz.blimke,

Not sure if you saw my post towards the start of this thread, but you could accomplish this via the closed captioning endpoint to display the countdown.

As for a timeline of another In Meeting Chatbot or notifications feature, rough estimate sometime next year.

Thanks,
Tommy

Hi @tommy

Thank you very much for the quick feedback on the timeline. At least we know it’s not worth waiting for these chatbot ot notifications features :slight_smile:

I have checked the closed captioning service and I believe we can work with that. Thank you for suggesting it.

In order for closed captioning solution to work for us, we need the following:

  1. Be able to fetch the https://wmcc.zoom.us/closedcaption... URL for given meeting via Rest API. Alternatively, if it can’t be fetched via API, we need to be able to generate it on our own programatically in the same way as it was generated by Zoom for given meeting. I can see it has id query parameter, which corresponds to meeting id. It also has ns query parameter. Can we generate the identical ns parameter value on our side for given meeting id?

  2. Be able to turn on “Show Subtitle”/“Closed Caption” for all meeting participants via REST API or via some account configuration that can be enabled for all meetings, to make sure the captions are displayed for everyone. “Show Subtitle”/“Closed Caption” is by default disabled on the Zoom client app. We don’t want to rely on people having it disabled by default in their Zoom app and having to turn “Show Subtitle” on their own. Our Meetings will be created programatically via REST API.
    We can possibly write notes to people to enable that, but it’s likely they will forget to enable it.

Thank you!

Bartosz

1 Like

@tommy if above 2 are not possible yet, is there a chance these will be ready before end of May 2020? closedcaptions are not a viable workaround for notifying meeting participants about the remaining time, without having solution for requirement “1”.

Hey @bartosz.blimke,

We do not have an endpoint to fetch the closed caption url programmatically yet. (ZOOM-100289)

As for setting the closed caption setting via the API, you can use the Update User Settings and Update Account Settings endpoints.

Thanks,
Tommy