Microsoft Teams Bots

Send a bot into any Microsoft Teams meeting with one API call, then use this page to predict exactly what it will do at every step.

A guest bot needs no setup. Pass a Teams join link to create_bot and the bot joins as a guest:

curl -X POST "https://api.meetstream.ai/api/v1/bots/create_bot" \
  -H "Authorization: Token <YOUR_API_KEY>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "meeting_link": "https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/...",
    "bot_name": "Notetaker",
    "video_required": false
  }'

Teams at a glance

Supported meeting links

MeetStream checks the scheme and hostname strictly and the path loosely. The bot opens your link unchanged, including any ?p= passcode.

A rejected link returns 400 before any bot is created. For a host that is not a meeting platform the message starts with meeting_link host '<host>' is not a supported meeting platform. For a home or marketing page it reads meeting_link looks like the Teams site root or a marketing page, not a meeting URL: '<link>'.

Work or school Teams vs personal Teams

Guest or signed-in: which bot to send

A guest bot types its bot_name on the Teams pre-join screen and joins as an anonymous participant. A signed-in bot first signs in to a Microsoft 365 bot account that you register with MeetStream, then joins as that account. Set it up once with the Teams signed-in bots guide.

Display name, camera and microphone

Display name. For Teams links, bot_name may contain only letters, numbers, spaces, hyphens (-), apostrophes ('), periods (.), underscores (_) and at signs (@). This is the pattern ^[A-Za-z0-9 \-'\._@]+$, checked after leading and trailing spaces are trimmed. Anything else returns 400: bot_name contains unsupported special characters. .... If you omit bot_name, the bot is called MeetStream.

• Guest bots show your bot_name. Teams adds its own Unverified label next to anonymous participants.
• Signed-in bots always show the Microsoft account’s display name. bot_name is not typed anywhere, so set the name (and profile picture) on the account itself.

Camera. The bot joins with its camera off, unless you set bot_image_url. With an image, the bot shows that image as its video, for guest and signed-in bots alike. You can change it during the call with send_image.

Microphone. The bot joins muted and stays muted unless it plays audio into the meeting, for example as a MIA voice agent or through the control WebSocket.

How a Teams bot joins

Scheduled bots. A bot created with join_at starts about a minute before that time and clicks Join no earlier than 30 seconds before it, so it is usually in the lobby when the meeting starts.

What counts as “admitted”. The bot moves to InMeeting when the in-meeting controls appear, or when Teams lists the bot in the call roster (not the lobby). The roster check matters for meetings where the organizer has hidden the chat.

The Teams lobby

What the bot reports while it waits

• InWaitingRoom (webhook bot.in_waiting_room) fires when the bot clicks Join, not when Teams actually holds it in the lobby. A bot that bypasses the lobby still passes through InWaitingRoom for a moment, then moves to InMeeting. Do not treat bot.in_waiting_room alone as proof that someone must admit the bot.
• The lobby timer is automatic_leave.waiting_room_timeout. On Teams the default is 1200 seconds (20 minutes) and you can set 60 to 1800. It starts at the Join click. If nobody admits the bot in time, the bot leaves with status NotAllowed, ErrorReason WaitingRoomTimeout (or JoinHang if the join never settled), and the message Failed: Bot not allowed to join meeting.
• If the meeting has not started, Teams by default keeps anonymous participants in the lobby until a verified (signed-in) participant joins. On Teams, the bot waits in the lobby until it is admitted or waiting_room_timeout passes.

{
  "meeting_link": "https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/...",
  "bot_name": "Notetaker",
  "automatic_leave": { "waiting_room_timeout": 1800 }
}

Who gets past the lobby

The organizer controls this in Meeting options > Who can bypass the lobby. Admins set the default in the Teams admin center under Meetings > Meeting policies > Meeting join & lobby > Who can bypass the lobby, and organizers can change it per meeting (Microsoft Learn).

Good to know:

• A signed-in bot signs in to its own organization. When that organization is not the organizer’s, Teams treats the bot as a person from an external organization, and only if both organizations allow each other in external access (Teams admin center Users > External access). Otherwise Teams treats it as anonymous, exactly like a guest bot. The Microsoft default is Allow all external domains, and Microsoft blocks external access with trial-only tenants by default, so use a paid Microsoft 365 tenant for bot accounts (Microsoft Learn).
• To get a signed-in bot through People who were invited, add the bot account’s email address to the meeting invite.
• Whoever is allowed to admit people (by default, organizers and presenters) sees the bot’s join request in the lobby and can admit or decline it.

Organizations that block anonymous join

Teams admins can stop anonymous people, and therefore guest bots, from joining meetings with any of these settings (Microsoft Learn):

These meetings admit only signed-in or verified participants. Send a signed-in bot. A guest bot reports one of these results:

• Usually status Error with ErrorReason TeamsSessionNotApplied and the message Error: Teams signed-in session was not applied to the meeting. This happens even for guest bots that never tried to sign in: it means Teams showed a sign-in wall.
• Depending on the exact screen Teams shows, you may instead get Failed / MeetingRestricted (a “no permission” page) or Error / JoinButtonTimeout (the pre-join screen never appeared).

The fix is to send a signed-in bot, ideally with an account in the organizer’s organization or in an organization it trusts.

When the bot can’t get in, or gets removed

Final statuses arrive as a bot.stopped webhook whose bot_event names the cause, with status_code 500 for failures and 200 otherwise. The ErrorReason is returned as bot_details.ErrorReason by GET /api/v1/bots/{bot_id}/detail.

Other Error and Failed reasons, for example JoinFlowException or JoinRetryExhausted, do not come from meeting settings. Create the bot again. If the reason occurs again, contact support with the bot ID. See the status and error code reference.

When the meeting ends

The bot normally reports Leaving (bot.leaving) just before the final status. After a bot that was in the meeting stops, post-call processing runs as usual.

What MeetStream retries for you

Automatic leave on Teams

Other Teams notes:

• Bot detection matches substrings, case-insensitively. Teams adds labels such as Unverified next to anonymous people, so match on distinctive words from the other bot’s name (for example notetaker).
• A bot that leaves because of bot detection sends bot.leaving with a message that mentions bot_detection.using_participant_names, then bot.stopped.

Full reference for every timeout: Automatic leave configuration.

What the bot captures on Teams

Audio

• Mixed audio is always recorded at 48 kHz. Recording (bot.recording) fires on the first audio frame after the bot is admitted.
• Per-participant audio (audio_separate_streams: true): Teams mixes everyone’s audio on its servers and sends the bot a single stream, tagged with who is contributing to each moment of sound. MeetStream uses those tags to split the stream into a file per speaker, for up to 16 participants. When several people talk at once, that stretch of audio goes to one of them. For overlapping speech, use the mixed recording with a diarizing provider. See per-participant audio.
• Real-time audio over the audio WebSocket labels mixed frames with the current dominant speaker’s display name. With per-participant audio on, per-participant frames replace the mixed ones once they start flowing.

Video

• Per-participant video (video_separate_streams: true): the bot records up to 6 video streams at once, including at most 1 screen share. When all 6 slots are taken, a new screen share replaces the most recently added webcam, and additional webcams wait for a free slot. Each stream is recorded at up to 1280x720 and 15 fps (about 1.5 Mbps for webcams and 2.5 Mbps for screen share). Teams chooses the resolution it sends and can change it during the call; each recorded stream keeps one output size for its whole life. See per-participant video.
• Meeting video (video_required: true) is built after the call in the layout set by recording_config.video_layout (grid_view, the default, or speaker_view). Per-participant video files require video_separate_streams: true explicitly. The recording is ready once post-call processing finishes.
• Screen share is recorded as its own stream and logged as screenshare_on / screenshare_off participant events.

Chat and visuals

• Reading chat: the bot records the meeting chat messages Teams delivers to it while it is in the meeting, without posting anything itself. Fetch them with get_chats or receive participant_events.chat_message webhooks. Teams meeting chat is a group conversation, so every captured message is recorded as sent to everyone.
• Sending chat: bot_message posts once when the bot is admitted (only if it is not empty), and send_message posts during the call. Guest and signed-in bots both post into the meeting chat. If the meeting’s chat is turned off, there is nothing for the bot to read or post to.
• Images: bot_image_url and send_image show an image, including animated GIFs, as the bot’s video.
• Recording controls: pause and resume work on Teams while the bot is in the meeting.

Participants and speakers

• Participant events: join, leave, webcam_on / webcam_off, screenshare_on / screenshare_off, chat_message, and speech_on / speech_off. On Teams, speech_on and speech_off follow each person’s microphone mute state, not detected speech.
• The host flag is set for the meeting organizer.
• People waiting in the lobby are not reported as joined until they are admitted.
• The speaker timeline is built from Teams’ audio contributor tags together with audio level.

Transcription and captions

• Post-call transcription works with every post-call provider.
• Live transcription on Teams supports deepgram_streaming, assemblyai_streaming, sarvam_streaming and meetstream_streaming. If you list more than one, the first in that order is used. The bot sends the mixed audio to the provider, and each result is labelled with the dominant speaker. Set live_transcription_required.webhook_url to receive results. See live transcription.
• Teams captions (meeting_captions provider): the bot collects the captions that Teams produces while someone in the meeting has live captions or transcription running. Ask a participant to turn on live captions, so that the caption file has content. Every caption is labelled English (en) whatever language is spoken. Captions are saved to the caption file after the call, not streamed live, and captions spoken while recording is paused are skipped. See Meeting Captions.

Meeting scope on Teams

• The bot joins regular Teams meetings and stays in the main meeting. Host webinars, town halls and live events as regular Teams meetings for the bot to join.
• Signed-in bots use commercial Microsoft 365 accounts. For government cloud meetings, send a guest bot.

Find your Teams bots in the dashboard

Open All Bots, set the platform filter to Teams, and filter by status to find bots that did not get in.

Signed-in bot domains and accounts live under Integrations > Teams Bots:

Outlook Calendar auto-join

Teams meetings usually live on Outlook calendars. Connect Outlook with POST /api/v1/calendar/create_outlook_calendar and an Azure app registration, and MeetStream syncs events, detects Teams links and schedules bots for them. Full walkthrough: Outlook Calendar Setup. Scheduling patterns: Scheduling bots.

Microsoft Teams FAQ

Next steps

• Set up Microsoft Teams signed-in bots for meetings that block anonymous guests
• Bot status and error code reference
• Automatic leave configuration
• Webhooks and events
• Debugging bots