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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

I am on the road to developing a nervous tick around people in my house trying to talk to me while I'm sharing my screen in a meeting. The mute button goes away from the screen, and the touch bar, and I just freeze up trying to recall where to find it.

Is there a handy solution for this or am I just screwed?

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Get a microphone with a physical mute button, or see if you can configure “push to talk”.

Yeah, I love the physical mute button on my mike.

I recently learned that if you mute yourself in Zoom, the space bar acts as a push-to-talk button.

You're hosed if you're switching focus away from Zoom (i.e. presenting). The keyboard shortcuts (Alt-A or holding-space-to-unmute) only work when Zoom is in focus

I have 2 monitors, and drag the zoom controls to the non-presenting screen

Getting a headset with a physical mic is probably your best bet

Side note: noise-cancelling headphones are way more useful than you'd think. I delayed for 5 months before buying them, and regret every minute I didn't do it earlier. Doesn't help with the mic, but I didn't realize how much extraneous household noises contributed to my malaise.

There are mic-end noise-canceling headsets too. I have a Jabra Evolve 40 UC which cancels out fan noise, street noise, etc. (it doesn't have noise-cancellation on the headphone end though -- the more expensive Evolve 75 does but costs $240)

https://www.amazon.com/Jabra-Evolve-Stereo-Professional-Comm...

For other mic-end noise cancellation, you could pay for krisp.ai, or if you have NVIDIA board, there's the free RTX voice virtual mic. Zoom to has background noise suppression you can turn on, and MS Teams will have NN-based noise cancellation in Q4.

Lots of options.

Headphones don't help with the particular task of controlling the mute button, but I can say the microphone of my noise cancelling Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones is significantly better than the laptop or camera microphone.

https://mizage.com/shush/

Alt+A in Zoom will mute it, I think it works if you aren’t in focus (although I can’t remember).

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