One of the constant occurrences in my full-time Work-From-Home world is the need to quickly mute/unmute my microphone. Is one of the kids coming to ask a question? Are the cats getting into a fight under my feet? There’s always a scenario where I am searching for the mute button on a call, sometimes unsuccessfully! I finally decided to look for a better solution than searching for mute in all the different places in Microsoft Teams, WebEx Teams, Google Meets, or Zoom. Below I’ll lay out the pieces of how I solved this problem for myself, but bear in mind this solution is focused on solving it for Apple MacOS. If you are running Windows or Linux, I’m sure there is a similar solution but you won’t find it here.

Stream Deck#

I recently purchased an Elgato Stream Deck, and am quite happy with the addition to my desktop and workflows. Even if you aren’t into content creation, it makes for a very powerful desktop tool for managing your computer at a glance. It does have some cost involved, (the model I bought was around $125 used) but if you just want to try the concept out without hardware, they do have an app you can install on your phone and subscribe to.

My Stream Deck App Folder

There are helpful plugins for things such as switching apps, media controls, seeing your CPU usage, or even one for Zoom](https://github.com/smitmartijn/streamdeck-zoom-plugin) (which I recommend if you’re mostly in Zoom). However, as stated above, I wanted a system-wide solution as I’m usually jumping from Meets to Zoom to Teams and so on.

There is no “native” control for microphone volume in the provided Stream Deck plugins, although you can easily control the output volume or mute it altogether, and even pause/play/skip media. I decided to dig deeper and ran across a valuable plugin that allowed a user to execute any arbitrary piece of AppleScript.

AppleScript#

AppleScript is the built-in system programming and automation language for MacOS that has been around since System 7 days. It is extremely useful for automating workflows or actions on MacOS. I’ve solved a few problems with AppleScript