Bot Overview

What is a bot?

A bot is the fundamental entity for accessing a meeting. Bots are single-use and bots are mapped to a single meeting (i.e. you can't have one bot join multiple meeting). The bot itself exists as a participant in the call and has access to all meeting features and data any other participant has.

With a bot, you can interact within the meeting via video, audio, chat, screenshare, and more. You can also access the meeting data (e.g. video, audio, transcription, participants, and metadata) in real-time during a call, as well as after the call for as long as the data is retained. The bot is white label-able, allowing you to customize your bot's appearance and control its interaction in the meeting itself.

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Some popular use cases for meeting bots are:

• Streaming/displaying the meeting recording and transcript from the call in your app (real-time or post-meeting) [real time transcription sample app].
• Extracting summaries and intelligence using AI to show in your app (real-time or post-meeting).
• Running analysis/workflows based on the meeting transcript (real-time or post-meeting).
• Having voice/avatar AI agents in meetings who interact with the meeting participants (real-time) [voice agent sample app]

Whether you want to run real-time analysis, transcribe and record meetings, or extract summaries and intelligence using AI, this can all be done through a bot.

Supported platforms

Recall bots support most of the top meeting platforms, but each of the platforms has their own nuances to be aware of. Certain platforms (Zoom, Webex and Slack Huddles) require some setup to start creating bots.

Creating and scheduling bots

See Creating and scheduling bots for more info.

Customizing your bot

By default, bots show up to meetings like an anonymous participant with their mic/camera off and with the name "Meeting Notetaker".

Regardless of whether you're using our Calendar Integration or the Create Bot endpoint, bots are fully whitelabelable which means you can customize how the bot shows up and how it interacts in the meeting. With bots, you can:

• Customize the bot's name - you can set the bot's name by setting the bot_name field in the Create Bot request.
• Customize the bot's display image - you can make the bot share an image either through the camera (participant tile) or through a screenshare (if permitted by host settings).
• Make the bot play audio/speak into the meeting using Output Media.

For example, you can make a bot an active participant by turning it into a voice agent and/or live avatar - stream a live avatar into the meeting through the bot's camera and play real-time audio so it can speak/respond.

Accessing meeting data

Bot's have access to all meeting data that regular participants do, saved as recording media. There are two ways to access this data:

• In real-time using Real-Time Endpoints
• After the meeting has completed on the bot recording's media shortcuts

Video + audio

Video only

Audio only

Transcription

There are three ways to generate transcripts through Recall:

• Recall.ai Transcription: Using transcription directly through Recall.
• Meeting Caption Transcription: Using the meeting platform's native closed captioning feature to generate a transcript in real-time.
• AI Transcription: Using a 3rd party AI transcription integration.

Which of these you choose depends on your requirements, and we recommend reviewing the documentation for each to decide which best fits your use case.

Participants and participant events

Bots capture several different types of participant data:

• A list of participants who are in the call
• A speaker timeline of all the timestamps of when a different participant started speaking
• A list of all the participant events that occurred throughout the call (e.g. camera on/off, screenshare on/off, mic on/off, chat messages, etc.)

This data is particularly useful for showing the user additional information about the meeting or controlling features based on participant states in your app. See Meeting Participants & Events for more info.

Meeting data

Bots can also capture some data about the meeting itself (e.g. meeting title). See Meeting Metadata for more info.