Question
People commonly ask on the Zoom Developer Forum:
How can I have a console-based ASP .NET service/bot automatically join scheduled Zoom meetings at specific times without any user interaction? Zoom’s API doesn’t seem to offer a direct “auto-join” without user authentication—are there alternative methods, APIs, or settings to support this?
Answer
In practice, a developer will need to pull meeting details and send a bot to a meeting at the time the meeting starts. This is the process of scheduling a bot to a meeting.
- Get meeting info programmatically
- If the user has a Zoom <> calendar integration, use Zoom’s API (e.g., List Meetings) to fetch meeting times and IDs/passwords. This requires the end user’s permission via an OAuth connection to their Zoom account
- Alternatively, if meetings are scheduled via Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook, use a calendar integration: obtain OAuth consent to the user’s calendar, read upcoming events, and parse the Zoom meeting URL/ID from the event details
- Trigger at the right time
- Use Zoom webhooks to react to meeting events so you don’t have to poll. Webhooks can notify your service when meetings are created/updated, letting you know when the appropriate time to deploy a bot is.
- Join using the retrieved details - When it’s time, start your console app/bot and join using the meeting ID/password or URL obtained from the API or calendar event.
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