MeetMe conference

MeetMe is a conference-room feature built into Asterisk. A conference room is just a shared audio space where two or more callers can hear each other. MeetMe was the original way Asterisk did this, and for years it was the engine VICIdial used to join an agent and a lead on the same line, and to add a third party for a transfer. The name shows up constantly in older guides, so even on a modern system it pays to know what it means.

The reason a dialer needs conference rooms at all is interesting. When VICIdial dials ahead and finds a live person, it needs to bridge that person to an available agent fast. Dropping both Channel legs into a small MeetMe room is a tidy way to do that, and it also makes features like Three-way call and Barge-in possible, since extra parties can simply join the same room. Each agent gets their own private room, so calls do not leak into one another even when hundreds run at once.

MeetMe versus the newer option

MeetMe is old. It depends on a special timing device in the system, and on modern hardware it can be finicky to get working, especially on virtual machines that do not have that timing source by default. That is why Asterisk introduced a replacement called ConfBridge, which is lighter and does not need the same timing hardware. Many newer VICIdial deployments lean on ConfBridge instead, though you will still see MeetMe references in older guides, sample configs, and support threads.

For day-to-day work, you mostly do not touch MeetMe directly. It hums along behind the scenes whenever calls are bridged or when Call recording captures both sides of a conversation. The main thing to know is that if you see "MeetMe" in a log or config, you are looking at the conference bridge that ties calls together, and that on a fresh build you may well be running its successor instead.