In the past two years, video conferencing platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams have become a staple of our everyday lives in both professional and personal capacities. Many tools have adapted to meet their users' needs by integrating with these platforms.
Despite Google Meet being the second most popular video call platform worldwide with 31.4% market share, it’s surprising how limited the APIs are. If you’ve ever found yourself searching “How to create a Google Meet link via API?” or even, “Does Google Meet have an API?”, this article is for you.
In this article, we’ll walk you through how to achieve the following integrations with Google Meet:
Although there is no publicly available API to do this today, there are a few workarounds:
If you are looking to receive Google Meet webhooks for when a meeting has started/stopped, user joined/left, screenshare start/stop and more – unfortunately, there are no such APIs today. However, here are some workarounds:
Again, there are no APIs that allow you to do this directly. You could use the Google Meet Attendance Reports feature or Admin SDK reports API mentioned in the previous section to retrieve these emails. You could also use the Google Calendar API to retrieve the participant emails addresses that are visible on the invite.
If you are on the “Business Standard” tier or above, you will be able to record on Google Meet. These recordings get stored in your Google Drive, under a folder called “Recordings”. By using the Google Drive API, you will be able to access these Google Meet recordings programmatically. Unfortunately, the Google Drive readonly API is a restricted scope and requires you to go through a restricted scope verification process, which costs between $15k - $75k for the security review and a minimum of 2 months to complete. This may not be ideal depending on your budget and timelines.
Once again, there are no official APIs to retrieve the real-time video or audio streams from Google Meet, but there is a workaround – using a meeting bot that joins the call as a participant.
A meeting bot not only allows you to work with the real-time video and audio streams, it also can record the meeting so you don’t need to go through the costly process to retrieve the recording from Google Drive outlined above. Additionally, the meeting bot is able to retrieve participant names and deliver webhook events when participants join/leave, screenshare starts/stops, and more.
To create a meeting bot, here is what you need to do:
If you don't want to build your own meeting bot, you can use Recall.ai. It’s a simple 3rd party API that lets you launch meeting bots without you needing to spend months to build, scale and maintain these bots.
Google Meet still has a lot of catching up to do in terms of developer experience and capabilities. In the meantime, we will do the best we can with the tools available.