When will the real-time media feature be available?

API and Webhooks
1

Hello, when will the real-time media features be available? We want to easily access real-time transcript, video, and audio data from zoom meetings. Thanks!

2

Hi @xukyocarolyn, if you’re talking about Zoom’s newly announced real-time media streams feature, its currently in closed beta and you can request access by joining the developer partner program (linked in the announcement above)

In the meantime, there are a few other ways to get the data that you’re looking for

Audio and Video

For audio and video, there are 3 ways you could explore:

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

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

Transcripts

For transcripts, the only way to get live captions is through using the video SDK. You have the option to get live transcription and translations if needed

The other way to do this is through the windows SDK where you can use the IClosedCaptionController to get the meeting captions

Use Recall AI for an easy alternative

It’s 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/video/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!

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