Just following up to give more info. As Sandip mentioned above, you’re right that Webex doesn’t currently expose an API to start or stop recordings. The /recordings endpoints in the Webex REST API lets you list, download, or delete recordings after they exist. You can’t trigger one to start. Starting a recording is treated as a user-controlled action inside the meeting, not something that can be fully automated from the outside.
As you mentioned, a solution is to use meeting bots that automatically join meetings as participants (just like a user joining from another device). Once in the meeting, the bot captures the live audio and video directly from the media stream and processes it on their side. In other words, they’re not starting Webex’s native recording feature; they’re doing their own capture.
If you want to explore that route yourself, it’s definitely possible to build a similar setup. You’d register a bot, have it join meetings through SIP or the Webex Meetings SDK, and then handle the media pipeline yourself (encoding, storage, etc.). It’s more work than just calling an API, but it gives you full control.
If you are looking for a tutorial on how to use a meeting bot recording API from a third party, there’s a good walkthrough that explains this concept step-by-step. Check out the blog on how to build a meeting bot. It covers the basic flow (creating the bot, recording, and retrieving the recordings/transcripts/other data) and applies broadly across platforms, including Webex.
