AlchelyMeeting
Video calls inside Alchely: there is nothing to connect before your first session.
Before you start
AlchelyMeeting is a marketplace tool. You need Plus and to adopt it from Marketplace → AlchelyMeeting → Adopt.
There is no OAuth, no third-party account and no other platform's paid plan: once adopted you can open a room. To attach one to a scheduled booking you also need Scheduler.
Free while in preview. It will become a subscription tool at 5 €/month; therapists who adopt it now will be told before that takes effect.
Opening a room
- From a new session: when creating it, choose AlchelyMeeting as the way to capture it.
- From a scheduled booking: open the room from the booking itself, and the session is created at that moment.
A booking is a commitment to meet; the session is the clinical work. That is why the session is created when the room opens, not when the booking is made. If you reload the page or open the link twice, you return to the same session: no second one is started in parallel.
How your patient joins
- From their portal, if they already use it: the session appears with its join button.
- With an invitation link, if you prefer: no signup, no password and nothing to install.
- The guest types the name they want to appear under.
- Therapist and patient always join as distinct identities.
- In a couple or group session each member joins on their own — from their portal or with the link in their own confirmation email. In a group session, neither the email nor the calendar tells them who else is attending.
The link is the permission. Each link names exactly one room and is worth nothing anywhere else. A forged link and an expired one get the same answer, so neither reveals whether a room exists behind it.
What you have during the call
Under the video are the controls. Each carries what it modifies underneath it, rather than spread along the bar: which microphone, under the microphone; which camera and whether the background is blurred, under the camera; sharing a tab's sound on its own, under sharing.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Microphone and camera | With their device pickers underneath |
| Background | Blurs whatever is behind you. It is computed frame by frame in your own browser, and the picture never leaves it |
| View | Both of you, your patient with you small in the corner, or them alone. It is a preference of your browser: each of you sees your own, and it does not change theirs |
| Chat | Text in the room, beside the faces. Nothing is stored: when the call ends, nothing is left |
| Share | Your screen with its sound, or a tab's sound alone without the picture. A badge over the tiles names who is sharing sound, because audio on its own changes nothing on screen |
| Bowl | A sound that rings in both rooms. See The singing bowl |
A shared screen outranks the faces. If somebody shares, what is shared is what shows; and you are never a thumbnail over yourself. Raising the whiteboard does raise it for both of you, but closing it is each person's own: pulling somebody's board off their screen because you glanced back at their face would be the same bug in reverse.
On the right, a panel that opens over the video:
| Panel | What it shows | Requires |
|---|---|---|
| Recommendations | Recent clinical alerts, last-session summary, previous agreements and suggested techniques | Augmented Memory |
| Chat | Questions about the patient — or about the couple or the group — answered from their sessions | Augmented Memory |
| Highlights | The fragments you saved from earlier sessions | — |
| Tools | The ones you have adopted, already scoped to this session. From here you launch Constellation on the session in progress: it opens in another tab, the call stays open, and the field work is saved back to this same session. On a couple session it starts in its couple variant, and on a group session in its group variant. The panel opens on a group session too | Constellation |
The singing bowl
A singing bowl that sounds in both browsers at once, yours included: what you hear is what your patient hears, rather than a sound you have to trust went out. It is for what gets marked rather than spoken — the start of a silence, the end of an exercise.
It has two modes, and nothing in between:
| Mode | What it does |
|---|---|
| Single | Sounds where you press it, and is done |
| Timed | Opens, waits and closes. You choose how long the middle lasts, and how many sounds land at the start and at the end (one to three each) |
- The opening and closing sounds are counts on the same mark, not clusters of their own: adding an opening moves nothing. They sit four seconds apart — long enough that each is its own sound rather than a roll.
- A single bowl takes an opening and ignores a closing: there is no end to mark on something with no middle.
- While a sequence runs, a countdown to the next sound sits in the top right of whatever is showing — video or whiteboard — and both of you see it.
- The button becomes Stop, and stopping is broadcast to the other room. A sequence nobody can call off is worse than no sequence.
- Ringing it is yours alone. It is not that the button is hidden from your patient: their browser would not obey the instruction either.
- Two sounds less than 2.5 seconds apart collapse into one, so a key held down cannot turn the bowl into a clang.
- While one is sounding the control says Ringing… rather than only changing colour — which is also how somebody who cannot hear it knows it went.
- The mode and the numbers are remembered in your browser, like the view and the background.
The sound is synthesised, not recorded. A real bowl would have meant a megabyte of audio to pull down on every phone, a licence to choose, and a first ring that arrives late because nothing had fetched it yet.
The shared whiteboard
Among the call controls there is a Whiteboard button. It opens a drawing surface in place of the video — on a laptop, two faces and a board at once leave the board too small to draw on. The audio does not stop: you keep talking while you draw. Back to video brings the faces back, and what you drew is still there when you open the board again.
- You both draw, with the mouse, a finger or a stylus. Each stroke shows up on the other's screen as you make it.
- Pen and eraser, four colors — black, red, blue and green — and three line widths.
- It looks the same on every screen. A circle drawn on your laptop is still a circle on your patient's tablet, even held sideways.
- Whoever joins late sees the whole board, exactly as it stands at that moment.
- Clear board and Save to session are yours. Your patient draws and erases their own strokes, but does not wipe the board or put anything in the record.
Saving a board to the session
Save to session takes a picture of the board as it stands and keeps it as an image in the session details, under Whiteboards, with the date and time you saved it. You can save several times over the course of a call: each one is kept as a separate image, so it works for recording how the drawing developed.
From the session details you open any of them full size and delete it once it is no longer needed. The section only appears if you saved at least one.
Until you save it, the board never leaves the call. What is drawn lives only in the two browsers. It reaches Alchely the moment you press save, and from then on it is clinical material belonging to that session, treated exactly like its notes.
What happens when you hang up
With Augmented Memory adopted and AI consent accepted by the patient — in a couple or group session, by every member —, the recording enters the same pipeline as an uploaded audio file: it is transcribed and the session draft appears on its own. You will see a notice that the notes are on their way.
Without Augmented Memory, or without consent, the room works exactly the same — it just does not record, and you write the notes whenever you like. In a group, a single member without consent is enough for the room not to record.
The session keeps the real length of the call, from when it started to when it ended, rather than the length the appointment had planned.