Virtual calls, or video conferencing, have become increasingly common for businesses in recent years, as they allow people to communicate and collaborate remotely. Today, almost every company uses virtual calls for various purposes, including Team meetings on the fly or Client meetings for express support or the like. Can you improve the way you create instant meets?
Automating the creation of Google Meets (or other virtual calls, depending on the tools you’re using) can be useful in various situations, such as scheduling recurring meetings, streamlining the process for ad hoc meetings, and, overall, improving efficiency.
Here we’ll go through how this can be done using a Slack command, and we’ll thus orchestrate three tools.
Manually create instant Meets
The fastest way to manually create a Google Meet goes through the Meet web app. Be it scheduled or instant, it would require to follow these steps:
- Go to https://meet.google.com in your web browser or open the Google Meet app on your phone or tablet.
- Click on the “Create a meeting” button.
- Choose whether you want to create a video or audio-only meeting.
- Enter a name for your meeting, or leave the default name.
- Click on the “Create” button.
This will create a new Google Meet and give you a link that you will have to share with others to join the meeting. You can also use this link to join the meeting yourself.
Manually creating virtual calls can be time-consuming, especially if you have a lot of meetings to set up. In addition to the time required to create the meeting itself, you may also need to spend time inviting participants, sending out reminders, and managing any changes or updates to the meeting details.
How can you create instant meets through Mindflow
Through Mindflow, you can automate the creation of Google Meets using Slack by orchestrating Google Calendar and Slack APIs. We choose to go with Google Calendar because Google Meet doesn’t have a public API. Of course, Meet, Calendar, or Slack can be replaced with the Microsoft equivalent or any tool that would better suit your needs.
So, with this in mind, let’s go over a high-level overview of how you could do this:
- Set up a Slack bot that listens for certain commands or keywords in your Slack workspace. Create the dedicated command for the Instant Meet creation on the Slack APIÂ website. Add the webhook URL of your Flow
- When the bot receives a command to create a Google Meet, the request will trigger the dedicated Flow on Mindflow
- Use the Transform Data tool on Mindflow to extract the information comprised in the initial request
- Push the information (name of the participant(s)) to Google Calendar can use the Slack API to extract information such as the name of the Meet and the participants.
- The user can then use the Google Calendar API to create a new Event
- Once the new event is created, the user can extract the information comprised in the answer request to collect the Meet link
- The user can then push this link to Slack, in the desired channel
As additional steps, you can improve step n°3 by requiring the end user to write names in Slack when typing the command. It would give /meet John Doe, Jack Bauer, for instance. Using the Data transform, you’re able to extract this information and push it to Google Calendar to add guests to your meeting once you create instant meet.
In the end, such Flow is among the ones that aren’t the most technical but will, as time gets by, be one that saves small amounts of time 3, 4, 5 or more times per day, every day, every week. Ultimately, create instant meets as such will participate in increasing productivity.
