Zoom Breakout Rooms

Overview

When using Zoom breakout rooms, the Recall.ai bot operates much like a human participant. That is, a single bot instance can only monitor one breakout room at a time. To record every breakout room concurrently, you will need to deploy one bot per room.

Limitations

• Single Room Focus:
  Each Recall.ai bot can only join and record one breakout room at a time, mirroring the experience of a human participant. Therefore, simultaneous recordings of multiple rooms require multiple bot instances.
• Participant Tracking Changes:
  To enhance breakout room support, Recall.ai has updated the way participant IDs are reported. Prior to February 24, 2025, Zoom participant IDs were reported as long numeric strings (e.g., 16831488 or 16779264). After this date, the IDs are reported in a simplified format (e.g., 100, 200, 300), ensuring that each physical meeting participant is uniquely identified.

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If you're using breakout rooms with the legacy participant ID system, please reach out to our support team to update your configuration. This switch ensures accurate participant tracking and an optimal breakout room experience. You can contact us at [email protected].

How It Works

No special setup or configuration is required to use Zoom breakout rooms. Use the Zoom breakout rooms invite link generated by Zoom and the bot will be able to join and start recording automatically

• Inviting the Bot:
  Simply have the host invite the Recall.ai bot to a breakout room. Once invited, the bot will automatically join that room and begin capturing the meeting data, including recordings, transcripts, and metadata.
• One Bot per Room:
  Since a human cannot be present in multiple breakout rooms simultaneously, each Recall.ai bot instance is limited to a single breakout room. To monitor multiple breakout rooms concurrently, deploy a separate bot for each room.
• When did the Bot join the room?
  When a Bot leaves a room and joins another (main session or breakout room), from the bots perspective all participants will leave and participants that are in the new room will join. This is seen in participant metadata as everyone leaving and participants in the new room joining.

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Set your automatic_leave.everyone_left_timeout to a greater value than the default 2 seconds. Otherwise the bot will quickly leave the breakout room if no one is in it.

Automating Bot Deployment

For teams that require automation in managing breakout rooms, a common solution is to pre-assign meeting participants to breakout rooms. This method allows you to automatically assign a specific bot (by email) to its designated breakout room.

For more details on pre-assigning breakout room participants, please refer to Zoom’s support documentation .

Best Practices

• Planning Ahead:
  Determine the number of breakout rooms and the corresponding number of bots required before the meeting begins. This ensures that every room is covered and no meeting data is missed.
• Consistent Naming Conventions:
  Use a clear naming convention for your bots (e.g., "BreakoutBot-1", "BreakoutBot-2", etc.) to easily identify which bot is assigned to which breakout room.

For further questions or support, please contact the Recall.ai team or visit our documentation portal.