Meeting Types — Phone vs. Video

At a glance

When the AI facilitator joins

This is the most important thing to understand, and it works the same way for both meeting types.

• The AI joins at the scheduled start time — not before. If you schedule a meeting for 3:00 PM, the AI facilitator joins at 3:00 PM.
• People can arrive early. Members can join the meeting up to 15 minutes before the scheduled time and talk amongst themselves. The AI simply isn’t there yet — it’s a lobby/waiting period.
• A lobby delay can push the AI even later. If your group is configured with a lobby wait (for example, 5 minutes), the AI joins that long after the scheduled start — so a 3:00 PM meeting with a 5-minute lobby has the AI join at 3:05 PM. People can talk the whole time.

This means early arrivals never get an empty meeting or an AI that jumps in before everyone’s ready — they get each other, and the AI shows up on schedule.

Starting a meeting early

Sometimes everyone’s ready before the clock says so. Any member of the meeting can bring the AI facilitator in immediately with the Start early button — no need to wait for the scheduled time or the lobby delay.

• Phone: the meeting’s owner or a member starts it, which dials everyone and the AI in right away.
• Video: while you’re in the lobby (or already in the room), press Start the meeting early / Start AI now. The AI joins within a few seconds.

Anonymous guests who joined only with a shared link can’t start a meeting early — that’s reserved for members.

📞 Phone meetings

Best for: anyone who can answer a phone — no app, no account, no internet needed. Great for members who aren’t tech-comfortable, or who are on the road.

How it works: at the scheduled time, TriLuna dials each participant (or they dial a shared number). Everyone lands in an audio conference, and the AI facilitator joins to run the agenda. The call is recorded, transcribed, and turned into meeting minutes afterward.

Limitations:

• Audio only — no slides, screen share, or video.
• Participants need a working phone number on file (for dial-out) or the dial-in number and access code.

Choosing the AI host for one meeting

Every group has a default AI facilitator, but a single meeting can use a different one — or none. Open the meeting, press Edit, and use the AI host field:

• Group default — the facilitator set on the group. This is what every meeting uses unless you change it.
• No AI host — the meeting runs without an AI facilitator. People are still dialed (phone) or can still join the room (video), and the meeting is still recorded and transcribed.
• A specific agent — any phone-ready facilitator agent you own or manage. Use this when the same group plays different formats on different nights, for example a trivia group that has one host for Jeopardy-style rounds and another for true-or-false rounds.

The list only shows agents that can host a group call: facilitator agents that are phone-enabled. Agents that confirm attendance or dial members before the meeting are a group setting, not a per-meeting one, and don’t appear here.

Your choice applies to that meeting only. The group’s default is unchanged.

🎥 Video meetings

Best for: richer meetings where seeing each other, sharing a screen, or showing a document matters.

How it works: participants open the meeting link in a browser or the app, set up their camera and mic on the pre-join screen, and enter the room. Early arrivals share a live “lobby” room and can talk before the AI joins at the scheduled time. The meeting is recorded (audio + video), transcribed, and turned into minutes.

Good to know / current limitations:

• Requires a modern browser or the TriLuna app and an internet connection.
• Screen share fills the stage. When someone shares their screen it’s spotlighted automatically, with everyone else shrunk into a strip beside it. Hover any tile and press its maximize button to spotlight that person or screen instead; press it again to go back to the grid.
• One video meeting runs at a time on the platform — if another is live, you’ll be asked to wait until it ends.
• Recording is a single combined view of the room (a “composite”). Per-speaker video isn’t separated.

How members hear about a video meeting

Nobody is dialed for a video meeting. Each person joins from a link, so TriLuna emails that link to everyone who has an email address on file, in addition to the usual text messages:

• When the meeting is scheduled: an invitation with the meeting page link and a calendar invite (.ics) they can add to their calendar.
• About an hour before it starts: a reminder with the same link.

Each email shows the start time in the recipient’s own time zone. The meeting page shows a countdown, and its Join button turns on when the meeting starts. No account or app is needed. The person who scheduled the meeting doesn’t get these emails.

To make sure a member gets them, add their email address to their group member details.

Choosing which AI joins a video meeting

The meeting owner can pick which AI facilitator joins by opening the Add AI menu in the room. The menu lists:

• TriLuna’s own facilitators — the general-purpose facilitator and any other TriLuna-provided agents that work on video.
• Your agents — every agent you own, plus every agent someone has shared with you. If an agent shows up on your My Agents page, it shows up here too.
• Your group’s default agent — marked Default, if the group has one set.

Only agents that have been set up for video meetings appear. An agent built for phone calls only won’t be listed until it has a video behavior configured.

Other members of the meeting don’t see the menu; they get a plain Add AI that brings in the group’s default facilitator.

🔜 Coming soon (video)

We’re building video-only capabilities that have no phone equivalent. As these ship, they’ll be documented here:

• Spatial awareness — the AI facilitator understanding where people are in the room layout and who’s looking at or gesturing toward what, so it can reference the scene naturally (“the chart Maria just put up”, “let’s hear from the folks on the right”). Phone meetings have no visual scene, so this is a video-only superpower.

Which should I pick?

• Pick phone when reach and simplicity matter most — everyone has a phone, nothing to install.
• Pick video when seeing each other or sharing your screen adds real value, and everyone has a browser or the app.

Either way, scheduling, the on-time AI join, the early-arrival lobby, and the Start-early button all behave the same — so you can choose based on the experience you want, not on what features you’d lose.