Developer Guide • March 25, 2024

What Are Meeting Bots? Unlocking Meeting Data, The Easy Way

Building bots is hard. Zoom's SDK is low-level, and Google Meet offers nothing. This guide explains how Attendee's REST API abstracts away the complexity to save you months of work.

Attendee Team

The Attendee Team

Experts in Meeting Automation

Key Takeaways

  • The Problem: Building bots for Zoom, Teams, and Meet requires separate, complex, and brittle codebases, costing months of engineering effort.
  • The Solution: Attendee provides a single REST API to deploy bots to any major platform, handling all the complexity for you.
  • The Benefit: You save significant time and money, and can focus on building your application's core features instead of low-level infrastructure.
Conceptual image of a robot interacting with meeting platform logos

In today's remote-first world, virtual meetings on platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet are the backbone of collaboration. These meetings are rich with data—discussions, decisions, action items—that is often lost the moment the "End Meeting" button is clicked. A meeting bot is an automated participant that joins these calls to capture this data, enabling transcription, analysis, summarization, and more.

Why Building Your Own Meeting Bot is a Nightmare

If you've ever tried to build a meeting bot, you've likely encountered a wall of complexity. Each platform presents a unique and difficult set of challenges. Supporting all three isn't just 3x the work—it's an exponential increase in complexity and maintenance.

Zoom: The C++ Gauntlet

Offers a raw C++ SDK that is notoriously difficult to work with. You're responsible for managing low-level audio/video streams, compiling native dependencies, and handling a complex state machine. A stable bot often takes a dedicated engineering team months to build.

Google Meet: The Black Box

Provides no official API or SDK for bot participation. The only way in is through complex, brittle browser automation (e.g., Puppeteer, Selenium), which is prone to breaking with every silent UI update from Google.

Microsoft Teams: The Separate Silo

Has its own set of APIs and authentication flows, completely different from the others. This forces you to build and maintain yet another integration, adding to the pile of platform-specific code.

The result? You're forced to build and maintain three separate, highly complex codebases. The engineering cost is enormous, and the maintenance burden is a constant drain on resources.

The Attendee Solution: From Months to Minutes

This is the exact problem Attendee was built to solve. We've done the hard work of integrating with each platform's native SDKs and reverse-engineering browser automation so you don't have to. We expose all of this power through a single, simple, and elegant REST API.

Instead of wrestling with platform-specific complexity, you can have a bot join any meeting with one API call.

The Hard Way (DIY)

  • Build & maintain 3 separate integrations.
  • Wrangle low-level C++ SDKs.
  • Reverse-engineer Google Meet.
  • Manage streaming infrastructure.
  • Handle constant platform updates.
  • Cost: Months of engineering time.

The Easy Way (Attendee)

  • Use one simple REST API.
  • Send a JSON request to join a call.
  • We handle all platform complexity.
  • We manage all infrastructure.
  • Receive data via webhooks.
  • Cost: A 5-minute integration.

With Attendee, joining a meeting is as simple as this:

POST /v1/bots cURL Request

curl -X POST https://api.attendee.dev/v1/bots \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "meeting_url": "https://zoom.us/j/1234567890?pwd=...",
    "bot_name": "My AI Assistant",
    "features": ["transcription"]
  }'

That's it. Our infrastructure handles spinning up a bot, joining the call (navigating lobbies and password prompts), capturing the audio, and processing it. Once the meeting is over, we'll provide you with a full, speaker-diarized transcript via a webhook or another API call.

By abstracting away the platform-specific complexities, Attendee saves you months of development time, significant infrastructure costs, and the ongoing headache of maintenance. You can focus on what matters: building amazing features on top of meeting data, not on the plumbing required to get it.

Ready to Build Your First Bot?

Our unified API and clear documentation let you go from idea to deployment in minutes. Stop wrestling with platform differences and start building.