| name | meetings |
| description | Use when building features that join, record, or transcribe Zoom/Meet/Teams/Webex calls — meeting bots, call notetakers, sales-call summarizers, interview transcribers. Covers ctx.ai.meetings.start/get/stop/list, webhook setup, and credit metering. |
Meeting Bots on Butterbase
Guide for building features that spawn meeting bots via ctx.ai.meetings. Covers the four SDK methods, webhook handling, idempotency, and cost-aware design.
1. When to Use
Reach for this skill when your feature involves any of:
- Meeting notetaker — bot joins a recurring standup or sales call and stores a transcript.
- Sales call enricher — join a customer call, wait for
bot.done, then run an LLM over the transcript to populate a CRM record.
- Interview pipeline — record and transcribe candidate interviews, then score against a rubric.
- Voice-of-customer transcripts — capture support or discovery calls; feed chunks into a RAG collection for future search.
If you need only audio/video file upload without a live meeting join, use manage_storage instead.
2. The Four SDK Methods
| Method | What it does | One-line example |
|---|
bb.ai.meetings.start(opts) | Spawns a bot and returns immediately with status: "joining" | const { data: bot } = await bb.ai.meetings.start({ meetingUrl, transcript: true }) |
bb.ai.meetings.get(id) | Fetches current status + artifact URLs | const { data } = await bb.ai.meetings.get(bot.id) |
bb.ai.meetings.stop(id) | Removes the bot from the call early | await bb.ai.meetings.stop(bot.id) |
bb.ai.meetings.list(opts) | Lists bots with optional status, limit, cursor filters | await bb.ai.meetings.list({ status: 'done', limit: 50 }) |
All methods return { data, error } — always check error before using data.
3. Typical Flow
- Configure webhook — call
manage_ai with action: "configure_meetings_webhook", passing forward_url pointing at a deployed Butterbase function or your own endpoint.
- Start the bot — app calls
bb.ai.meetings.start(...). Status begins as joining.
- Bot joins — status progresses
joining → waiting_room → in_call → recording. The bot.in_call_recording event fires.
- Call ends — bot status moves to
ended, then done once artifacts are processed.
- Webhook fires
bot.done — your handler receives the event. The bot's recordingUrl and transcriptUrl are now populated.
- Fetch artifacts — download the recording or transcript using the URLs from
bb.ai.meetings.get(id).
- Write to substrate / database — store the transcript text, link to the relevant entity (deal, candidate, customer), or insert into a RAG collection.
- Trigger downstream extract — run an LLM summarization, action-item extraction, or scoring job.
4. Webhook Handler Skeleton
Deploy this as a Butterbase function with trigger: { type: "http", config: { method: "POST", auth: "none" } }.
export async function handler(req: Request, ctx: any): Promise<Response> {
const event = req.headers.get('x-bb-event');
const body = await req.text();
const payload = JSON.parse(body);
const botId: string = payload.data?.bot_id ?? payload.data?.id;
const claimed = await ctx.idempotency.claim(`meeting:${botId}:${event}`);
if (!claimed) {
return new Response('duplicate', { status: 200 });
}
switch (event) {
case 'bot.done': {
await ctx.db.query(
`UPDATE meeting_jobs SET status = 'done', bot_id = $1 WHERE external_ref = $2`,
[botId, payload.data?.metadata?.jobRef ?? botId]
);
break;
}
case 'transcript.done': {
await ctx.db.query(
`INSERT INTO transcript_queue (bot_id, created_at) VALUES ($1, now())`,
[botId]
);
break;
}
case 'bot.fatal': {
await ctx.db.query(
`UPDATE meeting_jobs SET status = 'fatal' WHERE bot_id = $1`,
[botId]
);
break;
}
default:
break;
}
return new Response('ok', { status: 200 });
}
Key points:
- Use
ctx.idempotency.claim(key) — the meetings service may retry for up to 24 hours.
- Verify
x-bb-key-id matches the first 16 characters of your current webhook secret to detect stale post-rotation events.
- Return
200 even for events you don't handle — a non-2xx response triggers a retry.
5. Cost-Aware Design
Before dispatching a bot in a user-pays context, call estimateCost and surface the projected charge:
const { data: estimate } = await bb.ai.meetings.estimateCost({
durationMinutes: 60,
transcript: true,
});
Rates (v1):
| Dimension | Rate |
|---|
| Recording (mp4 or audio_only) | $0.50/hr + markup, prorated per second |
| Transcription | $0.15/hr + markup, prorated per second |
Both charges are applied against the app's AI credit balance once the bot reaches done.
For user-pays apps, hold a projected credit reservation at bot-start time and display a live cost counter using the bot's current duration (polled from bb.ai.meetings.get).
6. Vendor-Neutral Note
The underlying meetings infrastructure may change providers without notice. Do not depend on undocumented fields in the event payload or on provider-specific bot behavior.
7. What This Skill Does NOT Cover
- Real-time streaming transcripts — word-by-word transcript streaming during an active call is on the roadmap; not available in v1.
- Multi-region bot routing — all bots are spawned from US East in v1; per-region dispatch is on the roadmap.
- Browser-side recording —
ctx.ai.meetings must be called from a serverless function or server-side code, not directly from the browser. Use a Butterbase function as a backend proxy.