How to build a production-ready AI meeting assistant with Recall.ai in 48 hours

Why build an AI meeting assistant?

Today, AI meeting notetakers like Fireflies and Fathom are expected to be in meetings to record conversations, generate transcripts, and deliver summaries. More recently, desktop apps like Granola have gained popularity by allowing users to record meetings without a bot. The popularity of desktop apps has prompted teams to build their own Granola AI alternatives.

As recording a meeting is now the expectation, differentiation comes from what happens after the meeting, not from the recording form factor itself. This is where AI meeting assistants come in: understanding context, automating workflows and turning conversations into meaningful outcomes beyond summarizing meetings.

Infrastructure needed to build an AI meeting assistant

Most teams building AI meeting assistants use Recall.ai for meeting recording infrastructure. Recall.ai is an affordable tool that helps developers get to market faster by eliminating the complexity of building and maintaining reliable meeting recording infrastructure across platforms and systems.

At a high level, the following infrastructure is required to build an AI meeting assistant:

• Cross-platform meeting detection and join infrastructure across meeting platforms
• Meeting recording infrastructure for every meeting platform
• Extract structured data from captured meeting data
• Pipeline to funnel meeting data into LLM prompts/workflows
• Any infrastructure for the end user facing product

Developers building with Recall.ai get structured meeting data out of the box and can focus on building differentiated AI products.

For developers who choose to build their own capture solution, they need to either integrate with meeting platform APIs including the Google Meet API, Microsoft Graph APIs and Zoom Recording APIs (Zoom RTMS or Recording API) or build a desktop meeting recording app. Managing multiple meeting platform integration is difficult because each platform has different rules for meeting recording. Most developers rely on meeting bot APIs and desktop recording SDKs/APIs to build a more uniform way to capture meeting data.

Building a desktop meeting recorder from scratch requires capturing screen content, accessing system audio and recording microphone audio reliably across operating systems and devices. Abstracting away this complexity is one of the many reasons why developers choose to build with Recall.ai.

Recall.ai gives you flexibility with meeting recording

Not only does using a provider like Recall.ai remove the complexity that comes with building meeting infrastructure, it also gives you the flexibility of choosing between two form factors for meeting recording.

Whether you use a Microsoft Teams bot for meeting recording or a desktop recorder to record a Slack huddle, developers who use a meeting bot API or desktop recording SDK get structured meeting data like transcripts with speaker labels, audio streams with diarization and rich meeting metadata.

Structured meeting data is absolutely crucial for AI meeting assistants. To accurately generate summaries, action items, and follow-up email drafts, an AI meeting assistant needs to know who said what and when it was said. Having meeting context allows developers to skip past organizing and processing raw meeting data and fast-tracks building downstream workflows. Because Recall.ai delivers all this functionality out of the box, developers can get an AI meeting assistant into production in a matter of days.

Getting started with Recall.ai

To get started with Recall.ai, you need to sign up for a free account, get an API key and region.

Meeting Bot API

To send a bot into a meeting, you can use this endpoint:

curl -X POST https://$RECALLAI_REGION.recall.ai/api/v1/bot \
  -H 'Authorization: Token $RECALLAI_API_KEY' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "meeting_url": "$MEETING_URL",
    "bot_name": "My Bot",
    "recording_config": {"transcript": {"provider": {"recallai_streaming": {}}}}
  }'

The response will include a Bot ID. Once the meeting is over, you can retrieve meeting artifacts like transcripts and video recordings using this command:

curl -X GET https://$RECALLAI_REGION.recall.ai/api/v1/bot/$BOT_ID \
  -H 'Authorization: Token $RECALLAI_API_KEY'

Desktop Recording SDK

You can try one of the sample apps to see how the Desktop Recording SDK works. Once you are ready to integrate the Desktop Recording SDK into your own app, install the SDK:

npm install @recallai/desktop-sdk

To initialize the Desktop Recording SDK, add these lines of code:

const RecallAiSdk = require('@recallai/desktop-sdk');
await RecallAiSdk.init({
  apiUrl: RECALLAI_REGION
});

RecallAiSdk.addEventListener("permissions-granted", async (evt) => {
  // The user has granted all the required permissions to start recording
});

RecallAiSdk.addEventListener("meeting-detected", async (evt) => {
  const { window } = evt;
});

With these lines of your code, your application can detect meetings automatically and record meetings once they begin. If you want access to other meeting artifacts, additional configuration is required.

Opportunities in the AI meeting assistant ecosystem

AI meeting assistants are not just meeting summarization tools. They can solve many problems across different verticals. The more specific the use case, the more value it can give the end user. These are some of the most popular situations where an AI meeting assistant can help:

Productivity

You are a founder who just had a string of coffee chats today with investors and customers. You need to schedule follow up meetings and send emails with next steps once the meeting is done. Your AI meeting assistant uses notes from your AI notetaker and drafts follow-up emails and meeting invites so you just need to review and approve them.

Sales

You are an account executive in a call with a prospect who is asking specific questions about a technical feature. While you will arrange for a meeting between the prospect and an engineer on the team, the prospect has some immediate questions. Your AI meeting assistant helps you get answers to prospect questions in real time by searching your engineering documentation and surfacing relevant information during the call, allowing you to quickly confirm whether a feature is supported.

Hiring

You are a recruiter and need to meet with 10 candidates today. Each call is 45 minutes long. After each call, you need to summarize the meetings, assign a score to each candidate, and update your hiring database. Your AI meeting assistant generates a summary, extracts key candidate insights, and automates interview scorecards, saving recruiters hours of manual work each week and enabling them to move qualified candidates through the interview pipeline more efficiently.

Project management

You are a product manager in a meeting discussing the work that needs to be completed before the end of the week. Several last-minute tickets have been added, and the team is debating priorities and individual bandwidth. Your AI meeting assistants automatically create and assign issues and notify owners based on what was discussed in the meeting so teams can focus on execution instead of delegation.

Healthcare

You are a psychiatrist who meets over 5 clients in a day. After each session, you need to document the conversation, track the patient's progress, and enter information into the EHR. Your AI meeting assistants update patient records and extract relevant information so psychiatrists can spend less time on documentation and more time focusing on patient care.

FAQ on building an AI meeting assistant

What is an AI meeting assistant?
An AI meeting assistant captures and understands conversations from meetings, then takes action based on the context of what was discussed. Beyond transcribing meetings, it can extract insights, identify action items, generate summaries, and trigger downstream workflows in other systems.

How do you choose an AI meeting assistant?
The right AI meeting assistant depends on your industry and use case. Some teams need sales intelligence and CRM automation, while others need documentation, customer insights, or compliance recording API. You'll also want to consider whether you prefer a solution that uses a meeting bot that joins a call or a desktop-based recording solution.

Why should you build your own AI meeting assistant?
Building your own AI meeting assistant makes sense when off-the-shelf tools don't meet your requirements or if you're developing a product that doesn't exist for a specific industry or workflow.

What are common problems you'll encounter when you build your own AI meeting assistant?
The main challenge you'll encounter while building your own AI meeting assistant is reliably capturing meeting data. Whether you're building a desktop meeting recorder or a meeting bot, meeting capture infrastructure is more complex than it initially appears. Developers must account for countless edge cases, maintain compatibility with changes across meeting platforms and operating systems, and ensure reliability across large numbers of concurrent meetings. As a result, building and maintaining meeting capture infrastructure requires more engineering effort than expected.

How do you build an AI meeting assistant?
An AI meeting assistant consists of two core components: meeting capture infrastructure and downstream AI workflows. First, you need a reliable way to record meetings across platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. Building the meeting capture infrastructure is the most challenging part of the stack. Many teams use Recall.ai so they can focus on building differentiated AI experiences instead of building and maintaining meeting capture infrastructure.

Is Recall.ai free?
You can sign up for a free account and start building immediately. Recall.ai offers pay-as-you-go pricing and is designed to remain affordable for startups, indie developers, and growing companies.

What form factors do Recall.ai provide?
Recall.ai supports both meeting bots and desktop-based recording. Developers can use the Meeting Bot API to deploy bots that join calls, or the Desktop Recording SDK for applications that capture meetings without adding a participant to the call.

Why should we trust Recall.ai?
Recall.ai is the most reliable option in the market with over 99.9% reliability. Trusted by Fortune 500 companies and leading AI startups including ClickUp, Circleback and Mem to build production-grade products on top of meeting data.