Record and transcribe meetings with the Nylas Notetaker API

Meeting notes are the feature everyone wants and nobody wants to build. The hard part isn't the summary — an LLM handles that. The hard part is getting into the meeting: a bot that joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, survives each platform's waiting room and admission flow, records cleanly, and produces a transcript you can feed downstream. Each provider has its own join mechanics, and none of them ships a tidy "record this meeting" API. The Nylas Notetaker API is that bot as a service. You point it at a meeting link, it joins on schedule, records, and generates a transcript, and you fetch the recording and transcript through one endpoint. This post walks the Notetaker surface from the HTTP API and the Nylas CLI , which mirrors the whole lifecycle for terminal use and quick testing. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are exactly what I run when I'm testing a notetaker against a live meeting. Two ways to run a notetaker: grant-scoped or standalone Before any code, there's one architectural choice worth understanding, because it changes the endpoint you call. A grant-scoped notetaker is tied to a connected account and lives under /v3/grants/{grant_id}/notetakers . Use it when the bot acts on behalf of a specific user — it can read that user's calendar and join their meetings as them. A standalone notetaker has no grant at all and lives under /v3/notetakers . You hand it a raw meeting link and it joins, no connected account required. This is the one to reach for when you just have a URL and want a recording — a public webinar, a meeting on an account you haven't connected, or a system that deals in links rather than users. Same request body, same lifecycle, same media output; the only difference is whether there's a grant_id in the path. See the Notetaker overview for how both models fit together. Before you begin You need a Nylas API key. If you're using a grant-scoped notetaker you also need a connected account; for standalone, the API key al