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There’s no official open source Google Meet recording software: Google does not provide a public API that allows software to join a Meet call and record it.
However, there are still open source methods to record virtual meetings, such as creating Google Meet bots with Puppeteer or Playwright. These methods control the Google Meet web client and drive browsers to behave like human participants in meetings.
What is open source Google Meet recording software?
Typically, open source recording software offers a way to programmatically join a Google Meet meeting and produce a recording or transcript without manual setup. Projects in this space usually work by automating the browser to either extract captions or capture audio. This is a workaround, so there is no support from Google to build or maintain open source meeting recorders.
How open source Google Meet bots work
Mimicking a human user, a Google Meet bot joins a meeting in a real browser using a Google account. From there, it typically does one of two things:
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scrapes live captions from the page and treats them as a transcript
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captures meeting audio and sends it to speech-to-text software
Both approaches rely on browser automation, not official Google APIs. You can read more about using Puppeteer to build an open source Google Meet bot here, including some of the different ways you can get meeting transcripts using this method.
What to expect from open source Google Meet recording
Caption-based bots are easier to build, but require dedicated maintenance. Captions can miss words, speaker names are unreliable, and UI changes can break scraping without warning. Bots that capture audio for transcription and playback are often more accurate but require more engineering resources
We’ve shared an open source Google Meet bot repo and a blog to walk you through how to build a Google Meet bot that demonstrates the caption-scraping approach and the tradeoffs involved. This can be useful as a reference for how these bots behave in practice.
When open source recording isn't enough
Open source Google Meet bots tend to work well for internal tools, personal projects, and proof-of-concept work where occasional failures are acceptable. But for those building customer-facing products or working with high volumes of meetings, these methods are not sufficiently reliable.
Google Meet's UI is frequently updated, which can break caption scraping overnight. Managing bot infrastructure and issues like session timeouts also adds ongoing operational overhead, and teams often underestimate this maintenance burden until they're already in production.
Final thoughts
There is no officially supported open source Google Meet recording software. Existing open source Google Meet bots work by automating the web client and come with real reliability and maintenance tradeoffs.
They’re useful for experimentation and learning, but not a drop-in solution for reliable meeting recording. If you need to record meetings on Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and more, check out Recall.ai's Meeting Recording API.
