Bot Fundamentals

Scheduled vs. Ad Hoc Bots

There are two different ways of using bots:

1. Ad Hoc ("On-demand") bots - Bot joins call immediately, however bot availability is not guaranteed and you may encounter a HTTP 507.
2. Scheduled bots - Bot is scheduled to join a call in the future, and is guaranteed to join.

We highly recommend you use scheduled bots whenever possible.

To use scheduled bots, you can either:

1. Specify the join_at parameter in the Create Bot endpoint at least 20 minutes in advance
2. Use our calendar integration.

📘

Scheduling bots for the future using join_at

The join_at parameter allows you to schedule bots for the future, and you may be wondering if there are limitations or best practices.

In general, we recommend you to schedule a bot as soon as you know about the meeting.

Send Bots to Meetings

There are a few different ways to send a bot to a meeting in Recall.

Depending on your app's requirements and use case, you'll likely want to use a combination of these options.

Calling the Create Bot endpoint directly

This is the most manual way to send a bot to a meeting, where you simply call the Create Bot endpoint directly.

While it's the easiest to get started with and the most flexible, there may be a better way to create bots depending on your use case.

Automatically schedule bots to calendar events

The Recall calendar integration allow you to automatically schedule bots to send your users' calendar events, keeping scheduled bots in sync with any calendar changes.

For more information, check out our getting started guide here.

Adding a bot email address to the meeting event

Another benefit of the Recall calendar integration is that it enables your users to add bots to meetings through inviting an email, just like you would any other participant.

To enable this flow, see these instructions.