Respond to events from Google Meet

This document explains how to receive and respond to Google Meet events from Google Cloud Pub/Sub.

A Meet event represents an activity or change to a Meet resource, such as creating a new meeting. You can use events to understand what happened and then take action, or to respond in a meaningful way for your users.

Here are some examples of how you can use events:

  • Observe and respond to changes in a meeting, such as when a meeting starts or ends.

  • Track who attended the meeting for regulatory or training purposes.

  • Listen for the meeting transcript so the file contents can be parsed and logged into a CRM or database.

How events work

Whenever something happens in Google Meet, a Google Meet REST API resource is created or updated. Meet uses events to deliver information to your app about the type of activity that occurred, and the Meet REST API resource that was affected.

Example of how a new meeting space triggers an event.
Figure 1. A user creates a meeting space, which creates a Space resource. Meet then creates an event that contains data about the new meeting space.

Meet categorizes events by type. Event types help you filter and receive only the type of information you need, and let you handle similar activities in the same way.

The following example shows how an activity in Meet affects a related Meet REST API resource, and the type of event that your Meet app receives:

Activity Meet REST API resource Event type
A user joins a meeting space. A ConferenceRecord resource is created. New conference record

Receive event data from Google Meet

To receive event data, your app can do either of the following:

The following table explains the difference and reasons for subscribing to events versus querying for them:

Subscribe to events Query for data
Use cases
  • Process or respond to events in real time.
  • Monitor changes in resources to improve the performance of your app.
  • Retrieve data manually.
  • Fetch all data from Meet (due to an outage or inactive subscription).
API Google Workspace Events API Meet REST API
Source of events Conference record and users Space and conference record
Supported events Conference record

For a list of supported event types, see Event types for creating subscriptions in the Google Workspace Events API documentation. 		Space and conference record

For a list of supported endpoints, see the Space resource and the ConferenceRecord resource in the Meet REST API documentation.
Event format A Google Cloud Pub/Sub message, formatted according to the CloudEvent specification. For details, see Structure of Google Workspace events. A Meet REST API resource (Space and ConferenceRecord)
Event data Base64-encoded string with or without resource data. For example payloads, see Event data. JSON payload that contains resource data. For an example payload, see the ConferenceRecord resource in the reference documentation.

Example: Retrieve events about participants in a meeting space

In this example, a Meet app wants to receive information about participant changes in a meeting space. In the meeting space, a participant joins an active conference, which populates a ParticipantSession resource and triggers a new event. You can then get info about these events using either the subscribe or query method.

Subscribe to events

To receive events in real time, the Meet app calls the Google Workspace Events API subscriptions.create method to subscribe to the meeting space for all types of events. After creating the subscription, the Meet app can start to receive events.

A Meet app that subscribes to participant events using the Google Workspace Events API.
Figure 2. A Meet app receives participant events through a subscription using the Google Workspace Events API.

In figure 2, the Meet app has an active subscription to the meeting space, so the app receives an event whenever a participant session changes in the meeting space. The Meet app can then respond in real time to any of the activities, such as knowing when a participant joins or leaves an active conference.

To learn about creating subscriptions using the Google Workspace Events API, see the Google Workspace Events API documentation.

Query for recent events

Instead of receiving events as they occur, a Meet app can also call the Meet REST API to list recent meeting space events that are related to participant activity.

A Meet app that queries for participant events using the Meet REST API.
Figure 3. A Meet app receives recent participant events by querying for meeting space events using the Meet REST API.

In figure 3, a Meet app calls the Meet REST API conferenceRecords.participants.participantSessions.list method after all the participant session activities have occurred. The Meet REST API returns a list of ParticipantSession resources that represent each of the changes. The Meet app can then process or respond based on the recent activity, such as creating a list of participants that joined and left the conference.

To query for events using the Meet REST API, see List all participant sessions.

Limitations
  • Calendar invitees and other participants invited to a conference can only receive the following events: google.workspace.meet.conference.v2.started and google.workspace.meet.transcript.v2.fileGenerated.