[Video Demo] Working with Breakout Rooms in Daily Prebuilt
Tags: tutorial, webrtc, webdev
Published: 2023-05-24 19:41:02

_Video demo by Nienke Dekker, Daily Engineer, Prebuilt Team_

In this video demo, Daily Engineer Nienke shows you how to set up and use the Breakout Rooms feature in Daily Prebuilt.

"Breakout Rooms" let participants in a video meeting split off into smaller groups for more focused discussion. It encourages more interaction and engagement for use cases like webinars, events, and large calls.

"Daily Prebuilt" is Daily's hosted call component. It's an out-of-the-box video call solution that you can embed into any app with a few lines of code, and it comes with features, like Breakout Rooms, already built in.

In this video, Nienke demos:
- Enabling the Breakout Rooms feature in a video call
- Creating a meeting token to join the room as an owner
- Using the admin controls to create Breakout Rooms, assign participants to these rooms, and more

Do you have a question about this video?  Please post in the comments, or in our developer forum, peerConnection at https://community.daily.co

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Video Transcript
Breakout Rooms Demo
===

[00:00:00] 

[00:00:05] Nienke: Hi, I'm Nienke and I'm an engineer on the Prebuilt team here on Daily. Prebuilt is Daily's hosted call component. It's an out of the box video call solution that you can embed into any app with a few lines of code, and it comes with features already built in. Today I'm going to show you how to set up and manage breakout rooms in a Daily Prebuilt video call breakout rooms.

[00:00:25] Let participants in a video meeting split off into smaller groups for more focused discussion. It gets users more interaction and engagement for use cases like webinars, events, and large calls. So the first thing you'll need is a Daily room that has breakout rooms enabled, and you can enable this feature via the Daily dashboard.

[00:00:44] If you don't have a free Daily account yet, you'll need to create one before accessing the dashboard. So you can see I have breakout rooms enabled right here for just very room. You'll need to join this room as an owner. Only a room owner can set up breakout sessions and to join as an owner, you'll need a meeting token.

[00:01:05] If you're unsure on how to get a token, we have a guide on how to work with them at docs.daily.co. So once you have a room and you've joined as an owner at is right here, here, you'll see a button in a control tray. Again, only room owners will be able to see this button, in the call as an owner. And the other participants you see here, these are so-called robots.

[00:01:27] These are AWS instances we use for internal testing. A good thing to note is that only one host at the time can start a breakout session. This will avoid multiple hosts starting multiple breakout session at the same time, which would get pretty confusing fast. So with that aside, the first thing to do is click on a breakout rooms button and then in the sidebar, you'll be able to set up the breakout session. I'm gonna click, the participants join automatically button, because I want my robots to join the rooms automatically. They're robots. They can't accept or decline an invitation, so I'm going to need this option. If you're working with human participants, you won't need to select this option unless joining a breakout room isn't optional in your use case.

[00:02:13] So I can create as many rooms as I like. I've got six robots, so I'll create two rooms and I'll assign three to each. I can either select the robots individually and assign them to a room, or I can click the assign automatically button, which is right here. This button will randomly assign participants to rooms.

[00:02:33] So I can either drag and drop participants, or I can assign them automatically. So for now, I'll just use this button. So now I'm going to click the start breakout session. And one by one you'll see the robots disappearing from the main room as they're being forced into their two breakout rooms. And in my host over here, I can see who is in which room.

[00:02:57] I can see right here in the people tab, which robot is in what room. If I'm curious about what the robots are doing in room one, I can click the join button, which I'll do right now,

[00:03:12] and I can see what my robots are doing. If I want to move participants from one room to the other, I can do that drag and drop them between the available rooms. Like, so I click apply changes robots all will move to a different room. Another cool thing as a host is I can send session wide chat messages.

[00:03:38] So I'll just join the main room and go to chat and make sure to send a message to my robots. And if I then go into their room and go to the chat, I'll see my own message, which is pretty cool. When I'm ready to empty breakout session, I can click the end breakout session button and I can either choose to send the end this session immediately or give my robots a 60-second warning, and I'll just end it immediately.

[00:04:14] So then I can choose to start either a new session or recreate the previous one. If I choose this recreate last breakout session option, the participants will be assigned to the rooms they were in last. So to recap, in this video, I showed you how to set up and manage breakout rooms in a Daily prebuilt video call.

[00:04:34] To learn more about breakout rooms, check out our developer documentation at docs.daily.co. And if you have any questions about this video, let us know by posting in the comments. I will follow up with you.

[00:04:45]