Zoom Platform — connecting a standards-based endpoint to a live meeting

There are some compelling use cases to connect a third party application to a live Zoom meeting. One of those use cases is audio transcription and archiving. While the optimal way is for your application to get the audio recording post meeting through Zoom Marketplace and process that (the recording is available after the meeting ends and you need to be on the cloud recording add-on plan), there are ways to connect to a live meeting. Before considering this option, you need to make sure that you are not impacting the end user experience — users get freaked out if they see an “app” or a bot or a phone number showing up in the attendee list and listen to the conversation.

A pre-requisite for the first option to work is to have a Zoom cloud room connector license. One license represents one connection — if you have 100 licenses on your account, you can have 100 simultaneous SIP connections on that account

Connecting directly through Zoom Room Connector

You can add an open source SIP + RTP stack such as PJSIP inside your app. Depends on how your app or platform manages the meeting scheduling workflow, you can have your app call into the meeting with the URL “meetingid@<zoom SIP gateway public IP>” (example: 4087654432@192.168.33.164) OR parse the invite that has the SIP meeting URL and then join that meeting.

When your app sends the SIP INVITE to join a meeting, make sure you set the video SDP m-line to zero if all you want is to receive audio from that meeting and also set ‘recvonly’ for the audio RTP connection.

Connecting through a PSTN gateway

Another option is for your app to “dial” into the Zoom Meeting through a PSTN gateway and into the Zoom Meeting Telephony platform without going through the CRC. This is similar to someone joining a meeting from their phone by dialing the meeting phone number and entering the meeting. You do need a SIP gateway and a service provider SIP trunk (with all other infrastructure around it to handle failover, scaling, etc.). Your application will still need a SIP+RTP stack but it connects to your local SIP gateway.

If you have further questions, reach out to Zoom Developer Relations team at https://devforum.zoom.us/.