ROOMS is a lightweight conferencing solution. Everything about it is built around three ideas — and this guide walks you through it from first screen to first call.
Everything that happens before you join a call: finding a room, creating one, and sharing the invite link. The screen below is live — it follows along as you read.
The ROOMS home screen: the logo, a row of navigation icons, a preview of three room tiles drawn as floor plans, the room and display-name fields, and the Join Room button. It changes as you read through the steps below.
Join an existing room or start a new conversation.
Once your ROOMS instance is ready to go — this guide assumes onboarding has already been completed — every visit starts here. The home screen gives you an overview of the conferencing rooms available to you, a field to pick or search for one, a field for your display name, and the button that takes you in.
The screen above is interactive: hover anything for an explanation, or click a room tile to pick it.
Open the room field to browse every room you are allowed to see, or just start typing to filter the list. Each entry shows how many people are currently inside, and a clock if the room is scheduled.
Rooms carry their own rules — whether everybody can join, whether there is a schedule, whether a password is required. Those rules are chosen when the room is created (see step 4) and are visible at a glance on the room's tile.
New instant meeting spins up a temporary room on the spot. Instant meetings are hidden: they never show up in the room plan and are reachable only through their invite link. Create one, join it, and send the link to whoever should attend.
The home screen previews rooms as small floor plans, with the gaps between them acting as corridors. The drawing is not decoration — every part of it tells you something about the room before you commit to joining:
The preview holds three tiles, filled in this order: first a meeting that is running right now or starts within the hour, then the busiest occupied rooms, then the next scheduled ones, then whatever is left. Use See all rooms to open the full plan.
If your role is allowed to manage rooms — by default, anyone signed in with the Owner team password — a + button appears on the home screen, next to the room field. It is highlighted above.
Pressing it opens the room creation dialog, where you can customize:
Want people to knock even while the meeting is already running? Make the room private. A schedule on its own only gates the time outside its window — during the meeting, guests walk straight in. Private is the always-on gate, and it stays in effect whether or not the room is scheduled as well.
AI transcription is unavailable while end-to-end encryption is active — the server never sees the audio it would need to transcribe.
As soon as the room exists, its invite link is shown ready to copy. Send it to whoever should attend — for an end-to-end encrypted room, the link is also what carries the password, so it is the only way in.
There are two ways into a room: select it on the home screen, or open an invite link. Either way the last step is the same — press Join Room.
What you see once you are connected — and the controls you'll reach for most. The panel below is live: switch its views from the rail on the right.
The conference panel: the room header, a stage showing chat, video or a whiteboard, the vertical view rail, the participant rail, and the Control Dock floating along the bottom.
Joining a room opens the conference panel. The stage in the middle shows whichever module you are currently using, the people in the room sit in the rail on the right, the room's name and connection state are in the header, and the Control Dock floats along the bottom edge.
Hover anything above for an explanation.
The vertical rail beside the stage decides what the stage shows:
The arrow at the top of the rail collapses the participant list down to a strip of avatars, giving the stage more width.
Above the rail sits the split toggle. It pins one module into a narrow column beside another — chat alongside video, for instance. In the app it appears only once the browser window is wide enough for two modules side by side.
The rail above is clickable — try switching between the views yourself.
The Control Dock is the element you interact with most. It floats below the stage and holds, from left to right: your microphone, speakers, camera, screen share, raise hand, notifications and settings. The small chevrons next to the microphone and camera open the device pickers, so you can switch headset or webcam without leaving the call.
By default, guests join with the microphone turned off — which is why the microphone and camera above read red. If they should not be able to talk on their own at all — in a large conference, for example — that can be configured for the Guest role.
A participant who is not permitted to start their microphone is not stuck: the raise hand button sends a request to talk, which moderators can see and grant.
The bar along the top right tells you where you are: the room's name, whether you are connected, and how long you have been in the room. Clicking the room name copies the invite link straight to your clipboard.
The Share button beside it opens three ways to bring someone in: copy the invite link, send it by email, or add the meeting to a calendar. The copy action carries your current breakout room with it; the email and calendar invitations always use the plain room link, since a breakout room is transient state that has no business in a — possibly recurring — calendar entry.
Next to it, a sun/moon button switches between the light and dark theme.
The red button at the end leaves the room and returns you to the home screen. Before you are connected — while you are still setting up your camera and microphone — the same slot instead offers Back to home.
The rail on the right sits collapsed to a strip of avatars. The button at its foot opens it.
Expanded, every participant gets a row — avatar, display name and current status — and three further tools appear along the bottom: breakout rooms, the activity log and AI transcription. The last three steps take each in turn.
The list above is clickable — open a participant to see their profile.
Clicking your own entry opens your profile settings. From here you can set:
Clicking anyone else's entry opens their mini profile: their name, status and role, how long they have been in the room, and whether they are muted.
From here you can:
The last three actions — force-mute, kick and ban — depend on your role. If your permissions don't allow them, they are shown but disabled.
A breakout room splits the room in two. Everyone who joins one hears only the others inside it, so a side conversation can happen without leaving the meeting or starting a second one.
Making one is just naming it. There is no separate setup step and nothing to configure — type a name, press the button, and you are moved into it.
Breakout rooms then appear in the participant list itself, each as a card with its members grouped underneath. Above, Design review has two people in it while you and one other stay outside. Clicking a room you are not in joins it; the arrow on your own room leaves it again.
The tools above are clickable — open each one yourself.
The activity log records who came and went, and who moved between breakout rooms, each line stamped with the time it happened. It covers the last 24 hours of the room you are in.
The two buttons beside the title export it — as a PDF or as Markdown. What you get is an attendance list rather than the feed itself: one row per person, with when they joined and when they left. That is the form a register wants to be in, and it is the reason the log is worth keeping at all for a class or a workshop.
ROOMS can record a room and write down what was said. It is off until someone turns it on, and it is unavailable entirely while end-to-end encryption is active — the point of that encryption is that no one in the middle can hear the audio, and a transcription service would be exactly that.
Start Recording begins it. Because the audio leaves the room to be processed, the panel says so before you press anything.
While it runs, the tab keeps a red dot — so you can tell the room is being recorded even with the panel closed. Anyone with permission can stop it again; everyone else sees that it is running, and who started it.
Lines appear as they are transcribed, and Download Transcript saves the whole thing as a text file, with the room name, the time it started, and a timestamped line per speaker.
Who may do what, in a product with no user accounts. The screen below is live — pick a team from it, or switch its tabs.
General settings: a rail of icons down the left, and the App Permissions pane beside it — a team picker with buttons to make a team the default, add one or delete one, two tabs, and the team's name, password and privileges.
ROOMS has no user accounts. Nobody registers, and there is no list of who exists — so there is nothing for a permission to be attached to.
Privileges hang off a role instead. A role is a named bundle of them with its own password, and entering that password grants it for as long as you stay. There is nothing else to sign in with, and nothing kept afterwards.
Roles are created, renamed, given passwords and deleted in the general settings. From inside a call that is the sliders button at the right of the Control Dock, highlighted above — the same panel that holds your camera and microphone settings.
Arriving at a room gets you the default role, and the default role may not manage roles. It cannot even see that the screen exists — the entry is missing from the settings rail rather than greyed out, so looking harder will not find it.
Authentication is where that changes. It is the key in the rail, and it is visible to everyone, because it has to be: it is the one door that is never locked.
Enter a role's password and press Join Team. There is no user name to go with it — the password identifies the role, and taking it on is the entire act of signing in. The pane then says which team you are a member of, and Leave Team gives it back.
Watch the rail as it happens. A new icon appears: with a role that may edit permissions, App Permissions is now there — the pair of people, and where the rest of this section takes place.
Everything on this screen applies to one team at a time, and the picker at the top is what says which. The rest of the pane — the tabs, the name, the password, the privileges — redraws when it changes.
A fresh instance has two teams. Guest is the default, which is what everyone gets simply by arriving; it is marked with a default tag. Owner is the one whose password was set during setup, and it holds everything.
Three buttons sit beside the picker:
The screen above is interactive — open the team picker, or switch between the two tabs.
The first tab, Team Settings, is the short one: what the team is called, and the password that grants it.
The name is what people see when a role is mentioned, so it is worth making it read like a job — Moderator, Speaker, Front desk — rather than a description of its privileges.
The password is the entire login. Anyone who has it holds the team, and anyone who loses it holds nothing, so it is closer to a door code than to an account password: share it with the people who should have it, and change it when that group changes.
The default team is the exception. It has no password at all — it is what you get for showing up — so selecting it here replaces these fields with a note saying exactly that.
The second tab, Team Permissions, is the substance: one switch per privilege, covering who may manage rooms, mute or remove people, approve join requests, use a microphone or camera, start a recording, and change the instance itself.
Two of them are barred to the default team, and the switches are greyed out to say so: Modify App Settings and Modify App Permissions. Both are the keys to the whole instance, and the default team is held by everyone who arrives — granting either would hand the instance to the next person through the door.
Everything else is a judgement call. A team with the microphone switched off is an audience; one that may approve join requests is a doorkeeper. Roles are cheap to make, so it is usually better to add a narrow one than to widen an existing team.
Parts of the flow this guide does not cover yet. Each one needs screenshots before it can be written up.
Opening an invite link does not drop you straight into the call. It lands on the preparation area first, where you check your camera and microphone and set your display name before joining. This is the screen most invited guests actually see first, so it deserves its own walkthrough.
Needs: a capture of the preparation area reached via an invite link, ideally with the device preview visible.
The other side of private and scheduled rooms: what a guest sees while waiting to be admitted, and how a moderator admits or declines them.
Needs: the guest's waiting overlay and the moderator's admit/decline prompt.