Quorum

Quorum lets AI agents take part in live meetings. It joins Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Zoom and Discord as a participant, streams a per-speaker transcript, and exposes the meeting to agents as Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools: join and leave, read the transcript, post in the meeting chat, speak, and erase the transcript.

Quorum is part of Hive Commons. Its first consumer is Hive, where Spektacular asks clarifying questions during the meeting and hive agents research topics in the background, posting results back while the conversation continues.

The interface hive, quorum and spektacular build against is docs/contract.md (quorum.contract/v1).

How hive runs it

Quorum is a child process inside the hive container, like the spektacular binary. It listens on loopback only; no extra container or pod change is needed.

1. Hive writes a fresh random bearer token to a file at boot, and the tenant's Vexa API key (and, if used, the Discord bot token) from its keystore to files.
2. Hive starts node quorum.mjs serve with the QUORUM_* variables below and supervises it. GET /healthz answers {"ok":true,...} once it is listening.
3. Hive is the MCP client: POST http://127.0.0.1:8765/mcp with Authorization: Bearer <token> (streamable HTTP, stateless, JSON responses). Tools: meeting.join, meeting.leave, meeting.status, transcript.read, chat.post, say, meeting.delete. Every result is {ok:true,...} or {ok:false,error:{code,message}} in structuredContent and as JSON text.
4. Hive follows each meeting on GET /events?meeting_id=<id> (Server-Sent Events, same bearer): segment, chat and state events, one JSON object per data: line, id: = seq. Reconnect with after_seq=<last seq> to replay what was missed. GET /events without meeting_id carries every meeting, including Discord /hive join requests.
5. On SIGTERM quorum leaves Discord channels and exits. Vexa bots keep running until hive calls meeting.leave; a restarted quorum that is asked to join the same meeting adopts the running bot.

Meet, Teams and Zoom go through a shared Vexa deployment (hivecommons/vexa). Discord goes directly from quorum to Discord voice, with audio transcribed by the shared Whisper service.

Configuration

Secrets are only ever read from files, on use, so hive can rotate them without a restart; their values are redacted from every log line.

Variable	Default	Meaning
QUORUM_LISTEN	127.0.0.1:8765	host:port to listen on. Keep it on loopback.
QUORUM_TOKEN_FILE	required	File holding the bearer token for /mcp and /events.
QUORUM_VEXA_URL	unset	Vexa gateway base URL. Unset: Meet, Teams and Zoom answer platform_unavailable.
QUORUM_VEXA_API_KEY_FILE	unset	File holding the tenant Vexa API key (scopes bot, tx), sent as X-API-Key.
QUORUM_VEXA_VOICE	false	Default for meeting.join voice: start Vexa bots able to speak.
QUORUM_VEXA_TIMEOUT_MS	15000	Timeout for each Vexa REST call.
QUORUM_VEXA_WS_BACKOFF_MIN_MS	1000	First reconnect delay for the Vexa /ws feed.
QUORUM_VEXA_WS_BACKOFF_MAX_MS	30000	Reconnect delay cap (exponential, jittered).
QUORUM_LOBBY_TIMEOUT_S	600	How long a bot waits in a lobby before the meeting fails with lobby_timeout.
QUORUM_ECHO_WINDOW_S	120	How long the bot's own chat lines are recognised and dropped when Vexa reads them back.
QUORUM_DISCORD_TOKEN_FILE	unset	File holding the Discord bot token. Unset: Discord answers platform_unavailable.
QUORUM_DISCORD_COMMANDS	guild	Register /hive per guild (instant), global, or off.
QUORUM_DISCORD_SILENCE_MS	800	Silence that ends a Discord utterance.
QUORUM_DISCORD_MIN_SEGMENT_MS	300	Utterances shorter than this are dropped.
QUORUM_DISCORD_MAX_SEGMENT_S	30	Longer speech is cut into segments of this length.
QUORUM_DISCORD_JOIN_TIMEOUT_S	20	How long joining a voice channel may take.
QUORUM_DISCORD_REQUEST_TTL_S	300	How long a /hive join request waits for hive's approval.
QUORUM_TRANSCRIBE_URL	unset	Base URL of the Whisper service for Discord audio (/v1/audio/transcriptions is appended). Required for Discord.
QUORUM_TRANSCRIBE_TOKEN_FILE	unset	File holding that service's API token, sent as X-API-Key.
QUORUM_TRANSCRIBE_LANGUAGE	unset	Force a transcription language (en, de, ...); unset lets Whisper detect it.
QUORUM_TRANSCRIBE_TIMEOUT_MS	60000	Timeout for each transcription request.
QUORUM_CHAT_MAX_CHARS	2000	Longest chat.post text.
QUORUM_SAY_MAX_CHARS	1000	Longest say text (Vexa's own limit).
QUORUM_TRANSCRIPT_BUFFER	2000	Final segments kept per meeting for transcript.read and SSE replay.
QUORUM_MEETING_RETENTION_S	3600	How long an ended meeting stays readable before quorum forgets it.
QUORUM_SSE_HEARTBEAT_S	15	Interval of : ping comments on /events.
QUORUM_MAX_BODY_BYTES	1048576	Largest /mcp request body.
QUORUM_LOG_LEVEL	info	debug, info, warn or error. Logs are JSON lines on stderr.

Platforms

Google Meet, Teams, Zoom. meeting.join {url, display_name, voice?}. The platform and the native meeting id come from the URL (the same parser Vexa uses: Meet codes and nicknames, Teams /meet/<id>?p= short links including government clouds, legacy meetup-join links, Zoom /j/, /w/, /wc/ links on zoom.us, zoomgov.com and vanity hosts). The bot joins with recording off. States follow Vexa's bot lifecycle: requested, joining, lobby (awaiting admission), live, then ended, failed (reason lobby_timeout when nobody admitted it) or blocked (the platform refused a guest bot). say needs the bot to have joined with voice:true and a Vexa with the speak route (hivecommons/vexa#3); otherwise it answers platform_unavailable.

Discord. meeting.join {platform:"discord", guild_id, channel_id}. Create a bot in the Discord developer portal, invite it with the applications.commands and bot scopes and the View Channel, Connect and Send Messages permissions, and give hive the token. Quorum needs no privileged intents. Each speaking user's audio is cut at silence, transcribed, and emitted as a final segment with speaker.id = the Discord user id. chat.post writes to the voice channel's text chat; say is not supported on Discord yet.

Members can ask for the bot with /hive join from a voice channel. Quorum then emits {"type":"state","state":"requested","platform":"discord","guild_id":...,"channel_id":...,"requested_by":{...}} on GET /events. Hive approves by calling meeting.join for that channel (the request's meeting_id is kept) or declines with meeting.leave. /hive leave makes the bot leave at once.

Release bundle

Each release attaches quorum.mjs (one ESM file, Node 22 or later, amd64 and arm64) and quorum.mjs.sha256:

curl -fsSLO https://github.com/hivecommons/quorum/releases/download/v0.1.0/quorum.mjs
curl -fsSLO https://github.com/hivecommons/quorum/releases/download/v0.1.0/quorum.mjs.sha256
sha256sum -c quorum.mjs.sha256
node quorum.mjs version

Every pure-JavaScript dependency is inlined. Opus audio is decoded with opusscript's pure-JavaScript build and voice encryption uses Node's built-in AES-GCM, so nothing native is needed for Meet, Teams, Zoom, or Discord audio.

The one native piece is Discord's DAVE end-to-end encryption, @snazzah/davey, which @discordjs/voice requires and which ships per-platform binaries (linux x64 and arm64, glibc and musl). It cannot live inside a single JavaScript file. To use Discord, install it next to the bundle, at the version package-lock.json pins:

install -d /opt/quorum && cp quorum.mjs /opt/quorum/
npm install --prefix /opt/quorum --no-save @snazzah/davey@0.1.12

Without it quorum runs normally and logs discord disabled; Discord tools answer platform_unavailable. CI smoke-tests the bundle both ways, from a directory with no other node_modules, on amd64 and arm64 runners before a release is published.

Cutting a release: bump version in package.json and src/version.ts, merge, then push a tag v<version>. .github/workflows/release.yml checks that the tag matches, runs lint, typecheck, tests and the build, smoke-tests on both architectures, and creates the GitHub release with both assets.

Local development

npm ci
npm test              # vitest, with fakes for Vexa (HTTP and WebSocket), discord.js and Whisper
npm run test:coverage # the same with the 90% lines and branches gate on src/
npm run lint
npm run typecheck
npm run build         # tsc, then dist/quorum.mjs and its checksum
npm run smoke         # runs dist/quorum.mjs from an empty directory

To try quorum by hand without Vexa, run the bundled fake gateway. It accepts any bot, walks it through joining, lobby and live, then sends a transcript line every few seconds and a chat line now and then:

node scripts/dev-fake-vexa.mjs &          # http://127.0.0.1:18056, API key "dev-key"
dir=$(mktemp -d); echo dev-token-0123456789 > "$dir/token"; echo dev-key > "$dir/vexa"
QUORUM_TOKEN_FILE="$dir/token" QUORUM_VEXA_URL=http://127.0.0.1:18056 \
  QUORUM_VEXA_API_KEY_FILE="$dir/vexa" node dist/quorum.mjs serve &

curl -s http://127.0.0.1:8765/mcp \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer dev-token-0123456789' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Accept: application/json, text/event-stream' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"meeting.join","arguments":{"url":"https://meet.google.com/abc-defg-hij","display_name":"Hive notes"}}}'
# then, with the meeting_id from the answer:
curl -sN 'http://127.0.0.1:8765/events?meeting_id=<meeting_id>' -H 'Authorization: Bearer dev-token-0123456789'

Built on

• Vexa (Apache-2.0) joins Teams, Meet and Zoom and produces the transcript. Quorum contributes upstream; hivecommons/vexa carries only what upstream has not released yet.
• discord.js and @discordjs/voice (Apache-2.0) for Discord, with @snazzah/davey (MIT) for DAVE and opusscript (MIT) for Opus.
• joinly (MIT) is the design reference for exposing a meeting as MCP tools.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome under the Developer Certificate of Origin. Sign off every commit with git commit -s; CI checks every commit.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.