What Zoom gives you

Zoom has three transcript-ish artifacts. Only one of them is free of cloud recording.

What Zoom gives you

Zoom has three transcript-ish artifacts, not one. Different prerequisites, different endpoints, different costs. Picking the wrong one is the main way this goes sideways.

#	Artifact	Recording?	Format	Endpoint
1	Cloud recording audio transcript	Yes	VTT	`/meetings/<id>/recordings`
2	AI Companion meeting summary	No	JSON	`/meetings/<id>/meeting_summary`
3	AI Companion retained transcript	No	VTT	`/meetings/<meeting-uuid>/transcript`

Row 3 is what we take. Settled.

Why route 3

  ROUTE 1                              ROUTE 3
  ───────────────────────────          ───────────────────────────
  needs cloud recording        ✗       no recording object       ✓
  eats pooled storage quota    ✗       no storage quota          ✓
  someone must press Record    ✗       auto-start does it        ✓
  video you didn't want        ✗       text only                 ✓

Route 1 makes you buy video storage to get text, and it depends on a human remembering a button.

The catch on route 3: the transcript is a byproduct of AI Companion meeting summary running. If a host must press a button to start the summary, you have swapped one forgettable button for another. Auto-start is a requirement of this design, not a nicety — see Zoom settings.

The claim is verified

A Zoom staffer in the dev forum confirmed retrieving an AI Companion transcript over the API after enabling “Allow meeting hosts to retain and access meeting transcripts”, with no cloud recording involved (devforum thread 136510). A second thread says the same: retrievable “without a recording object present” (thread 142661). The admin surface exists too — Account Management → Recording and Transcript Management → Transcripts, searchable by meeting ID or host email, with “no limit on the date you can specify” (support article KB0076632).

Careful: plenty of blog and forum prose says flatly “transcripts require cloud recording.” That is true of the /recordings endpoint and false of /meetings/<meeting-uuid>/transcript. Do not let a search snippet talk you out of route 3.

Plan floor

Thing	Minimum plan
Retain AI Companion transcripts	Pro and above (KB0076631)
AI Companion meeting summary	eligible paid Workplace plans; not Basic
Cloud recording + audio transcript	Pro and above (KB0064927)

Zoom Pro is the floor for every route. The 2026 repackaging moved the old AI Companion add-on tiers into “ZoomMate”. We do not need it — meeting summary and transcript retention are in the base paid plan.

Retention

Zoom does not auto-delete unless an admin sets a policy. AI Companion transcripts appear to have no date ceiling [SPEC]. Do not rely on it. Our copy is the archive — that is the point of the whole pipeline.