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A conference bridge is a two-way multi-party meeting room: callers dial in, the room mixes their audio, and everyone hears everyone. This guide covers the operator loop — when to choose a conference over a transfer or a shared line, how to create the room from Voice → Conferences, how participants join over each connectivity path, how to manage the roster while the room is live, and how recording and reporting differ from a 1:1 call. Base path: /api/v1/voice Authentication: Clerk session (Authorization: Bearer <token>) or API key (X-API-Key). Scope: every create and participant-control mutation requires a role with voice write access (owner, admin, or developer). Listing rooms and reading rosters requires voice read. The dashboard’s Voice → Conferences page is built on the API below, so everything on this page maps to a console control or its underlying POST/GET — pick whichever surface fits your operating model.

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1. Conference vs queued transfer vs shared line

Choose the right group-calling pattern before you build: A conference is a meeting: set the room, hand around the join PIN, and the roster is two-way participants. A queue is inbound dispatch — callers line up, an agent takes one at a time. A shared line is a ringing identity — members race to answer, and grab the call between devices. A page is fire-and-forget — one announcement, no return path. For ad-hoc “conference in a third party” while a 1:1 call is live, the warm-transfer flow is the right tool; this page covers the named, reusable bridge room. The decision stays tenant-owned: whichever pattern you pick, the dial-out legs the room places and the compliance gates they pass (quiet-hours, DNC, recording consent) remain under your tenant’s configured controls.

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2. Create a conference

Open Voice → Conferences and choose New conference, or call POST /api/v1/voice/conferences.
cURL
The dashboard and the API let you set the same create-time fields: The 201 response returns the room’s conf_<32 hex> id and the active pin — the dashboard shows the PIN on the room detail so the operator can distribute it. Pass an Idempotency-Key on create and a retry within five minutes returns the original room rather than a duplicate — useful when the create is fired from an automation that retries on timeouts. Seeded dial-out is fan-out, not a fuse: if one dialed participant misses the call, that leg lands on the roster as failed with its SIP response code and the room still exists. If every seeded leg fails, the room is closed failed — rotate to the troubleshooting page for the per-leg reason.

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3. Join from SIP trunk, PBX registration, or softphone

A conference accepts legs over whichever inbound connectivity your tenant already runs — the dial-out legs you seed at create are only the proactive side; participants who call into the room come over one of these:

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From a SIP trunk

Point the trunk’s inbound route at the conference’s bridge number and carry the join PIN in the pin field on the room (or pass it per invitation). The trunk leg terminates on Orbit over the Devotel softswitch and lands in the room; the participant enters the roster once the leg answers. The SIP trunk connection guide covers trunk registration.

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From PBX registration

A PBX registered on Orbit sees the bridge like any other extension — the PBX leg dials the room’s bridge number, keys in the PIN (4–8 digits) at the IVR prompt, and joins. See Registering your PBX on Orbit. Registration keeps the leg alive across the join prompt, which matters for the rejoin workflow in section 6.

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From a softphone or browser client

The Orbit softphone and the browser voice client join the room directly — no SIP trunk needed — using the in-app Join with PIN action on Voice → Conferences. This is the path for teammates on the web or mobile app. See Softphone browser calling. Both inbound paths land on the same participant roster the dialed (seeded) legs use; each row carries its own status (ringing, connected, no_answer, failed) and join/leave timestamps. Invite more participants one by one with POST /api/v1/voice/conferences/:id/participants — pass target.kind: "pstn" with an E.164 number or target.kind: "sip" with a sip: URI, plus the room’s pin when the room has one.

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4. Manage live participants

The dashboard’s room detail page and these endpoints share the same participant controls; every one of them verifies the conference and participant pair belongs to your tenant before the action lands.
  • Mute a participant — POST /conferences/:id/participants/:pid/mute (unmute with /unmute). The muted leg still hears the room but cannot speak — typical for a noisy line.
  • Hold / unhold a participant — POST /conferences/:id/participants/:pid/hold (release with /unhold). A held leg loses media until you release it; useful when an invitee needs to step off without leaving.
  • Drop a participant — DELETE /conferences/:id/participants/:pid. Ends that leg and records the leave with its last SIP response code.
  • Elevate to host — a participant who knows the room’s host_pin exercises host-only controls (host PIN checks a separate credential from the join PIN, rotating either one does not affect the other).
  • Rotate the join PIN mid-call — POST /conferences/:id/regenerate-pin. When a PIN leaks mid-meeting, rotate it without ending the room; existing legs stay, new joiners use the new PIN.
The room’s detail page also shows per-leg status and SIP response codes live, so you can watch a mute or drop take effect before you close the drawer. Each control emits a participant row update with its own audit timestamp — the audit trail tells hosts who muted whom, and when, without exposing participants from another tenant.

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5. Recording and analytics — how a conference differs

Recording and QA treat a conference differently from a 1:1 call because the room is the unit of consent and billing, not the individual leg. Recording modes. The room’s record_mode setting accepts manual, auto_with_consent, or disabled; pass record: true at create to start in auto_with_consent, or patch it with PATCH /conferences/:id. In auto_with_consent the platform collects each join-time consent decision per leg — POST /conferences/:id/participants/:pid/consent with { "state": "granted" } or { "state": "declined" } records the outcome, and the recording captures the room only while the consent ledger allows. Every consent row is tenant-scoped, and the room’s behavior stays inside your tenant’s compliance posture. Billing. The platform bills the dial-out legs that place the room — per-leg, per-minute metering over the Devotel softswitch — rather than a flat “room” charge. A conference of four joined participants bills four leg-minutes per minute of meeting; inbound legs that dial in are billed as inbound to their trunk or registration path. QA scoring. A room’s recording lands in the Recording library as a single multi-party asset. QA scoring for conferences runs against the room as a whole — the post-call score is computed once for the room, not per leg — so a weekly all-hands earns one scoring row per meeting, while per-agent QA coverage stays with 1:1 conversations. This matches how the aggregate rollup isolates conference KPIs (GET /conferences/aggregate) from the per-call index. Analytics. GET /conferences/aggregate returns the KPI strip for the window you ask (total, active now, average duration, success rate, peak concurrent participants, participants in window), and GET /conferences/failure-analytics returns failure rates with the top failure reasons and affected destinations. Both accept window_days up to 365. Compliance inside the tenant. Room PIN rotation, recording consent, per-leg hold/mute/drop, and end reasons are all per-tenant controls — keeping the room’s behavior inside your tenant’s configured compliance posture. Platform hard limits that apply regardless: at most 32 participants per room, a four-hour expiry backstop that ends any lingering room, and PIN values restricted to 4–8 digits.

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6. Worked example — weekly all-hands that survives rejoins

The pattern where the conference earns its keep: a named weekly meeting team members rejoin as they drop.
  1. On Monday, create the room once: name Weekly all-hands, maxParticipants: 24, record: true, an auto-generated join PIN that the operator distributes in the invite.
  2. Team members join from their PBX registration or softphone (section 3), or the organizer dials external guests one by one (section 3, invite endpoint).
  3. If a participant’s line drops, they dial back and enter the same PIN; the room is still open because the last-leg-close and four-hour backstop only matter when nobody is left. The join-time consent prompt fires again on the rejoined leg, and the room’s recording stays continuous across rejoins.
  4. A noisy line joins: a host mutes it (section 4). If the PIN goes around the wrong group, the host rotates it mid-meeting with regenerate-pin and distributes the new PIN in the chat thread.
  5. After the meeting, conference.ended fires once — with end_reason: "all_legs_terminated" if the last participant hung up, or manual_end if the host closed it — the room’s per-leg ledger and the recording are still fully retrievable from the Recording library and the participants endpoint after the room closes.
The end-to-end flow the room runs: