In this time of forced remote working due to #coronavirus, a lot of people on Twitter pointed out that during a conference call you should have your microphone OFF by default and only enable it when you want to speak.

I have been using Google Meet a lot lately and I can easily use Cmd+D to mute and unmute the button. Unfortunately, Cmd+D is also the shortcut for “Bookmark page“.

Something that I like more is a Push-to-talk approach using the spacebar:

  1. Mic is OFF by default
  2. I press and hold the spacebar, the mic switches ON
  3. I talk
  4. I release the spacebar and the mic switches OFF again.

I looked around for some existing solution and I found this by Patrick Barnes. It looked perfect!

I wanted to try the Greasemonkey version, but apparently there is no Greasemonkey for Google Chrome… or is it?! 👀

Turns out, there is Tampermonkey. One you installed it, you have a new icon in your Chrome toolbar:

Right click on the icon and you can access the Option menu:

From Settings, you can add a new script:

You end up in a new screen that looks like an online editor:

We need to copy-past Patrick’s script in here. We copy it from here and we paste it:

We paste it and we save. We now have it in our Installed scripts:

This is pretty much it. The next time we open a Google Meet conference call, we will be able to “press and hold” spacebar to turn ON the microphone 🎤 😍