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 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:
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.
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.
Roles decide who may create rooms, who is admitted to a private room without knocking, and who may unmute. They are referenced throughout this guide but never explained in one place — what the Owner, Moderator and Guest roles can do, and where those permissions are configured.
Needs: a capture of the role/permission configuration screen.
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.