How the Zoom connection works
Pepys does not send a bot, a notetaker, or a participant into your meeting. The Zoom integration reads recordings that Zoom itself already produced and stored in the cloud – which means the people on the call see nothing out of the ordinary and no guest shows up in the participant list.
The connection requests two read-only permissions: cloud_recording:read:list_user_recordings to see your recordings and cloud_recording:read:list_recording_files to read the files for one meeting. There is no meeting-management scope and no account-wide scope, and credentials are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before storage.
Connect Zoom
Open Settings → Integrations and press Connect Zoom, then approve Zoom's consent screen. Once connected, the uploader's Zoom option becomes a recording browser instead of an upload field.
If the grant is ever revoked or the tokens expire, the button changes to Reconnect Zoom and imports stop until you reconnect. Existing transcripts are unaffected.
Pick a recording and transcribe it
Press the Zoom button in the uploader to open the recording browser. It lists your completed cloud recordings from the last 30 days, so you are choosing from calls Zoom has already finished processing rather than hunting for a download link.
Select the meeting you want and start the transcription. Pepys fetches the recording's audio at transcription time using a short-lived access token – the download URL itself is never something you have to handle.
Why a recording can be unavailable
If a recording has been deleted in Zoom, or has aged out of the retention window, the import fails with a message saying the recording is no longer available. That is Zoom's copy being gone rather than a Pepys failure – the audio has to exist in Zoom's cloud for us to read it.
Local recordings never reach Zoom's cloud at all, so they are not visible to the integration. For those, upload the file directly or put it in Google Drive or OneDrive and import it from there.
Good to know
Zoom imports bill per minute against your credits, like any other transcription: 1 credit = 1 minute, credits never expire. Free accounts get three connected-source imports, counted across Drive, OneDrive, and Zoom together.
Transcripts arrive with speaker labels, an AI summary, and exports in TXT, Markdown, DOCX, PDF, SRT, VTT, and JSON. If you were not the meeting host and have no cloud recording to point at, see how to get a Zoom transcript without being host.
The other integration routes – Drive, OneDrive, Telegram, Zapier, and the Chrome extension – are listed on the integrations page.