Add some mechanism to automatically unmute inbound audio when using the microphone

[felipecrs]

I keep the audio of my cameras muted by default in the card. However, it would be nice to have an option like:

Automatically unmute when microphone connects

So that I don't need to press 2 buttons in order to have a proper conversation.

[felipecrs]

Maybe a new microphone_connected card condition?

[felipecrs]

I have even another use case for such a condition:

• When microphone_connected is off, I'd like to set the microphone icon to something else like:

[dermotduffy]

Automatically unmute when microphone connects

I think you mean unmute the inbound audio, not unmute the microphone?

Maybe a new microphone_connected card condition?

Does "connected" here mean the microphone is attached the stream (regardless of whether the microphone is muted/unmuted) or does it mean when the microphone is unmuted? I think the former...

[dermotduffy]

I've been thinking about adding a new automations section that would run card commands when card conditions are met. If we added a new microphone_connected condition, and we had this, you could:

• Use overrides to change the menu icon.
• User automations to automatically send an unmute command to the feed.

Something like this:

overrides:
  condition:
    microphone_connected: true // <----------- Does not exist
  menu:
    buttons:
      microphone:
        icon: mdi:phone-in-talk-outline
automations: // <------------ Does not exist
  condition:
    microphone_connected: true // <----------- Does not exist
  actions:
      - action: custom:frigate-card-action
        frigate_card_action: unmute // <------------ Does not exist
  condition:
    microphone_connected: false // <----------- Does not exist
  actions:
      - action: custom:frigate-card-action
        frigate_card_action: mute // <------------ Does not exist

Is this the kind of thing you mean? The other approach would be to add a new value for live.auto_unmute which is microphone and perhaps something similar for live.auto_mute to do the opposite.

[dermotduffy]

Is this the kind of thing you mean? The other approach would be to add a new value for live.auto_unmute which is microphone and perhaps something similar for live.auto_mute to do the opposite.

Maybe something like this is more sensible in this case, unmuting your inbound audio stream when you use a microphone seems obvious, and it'd be weird to have to add 11 lines of config (as extensible as it is) just to get that to happen.

[felipecrs]

Automatically unmute when microphone connects

I think you mean unmute the inbound audio, not unmute the microphone?

Maybe a new microphone_connected card condition?

Does "connected" here mean the microphone is attached the stream (regardless of whether the microphone is muted/unmuted) or does it mean when the microphone is unmuted? I think the former...

Correct for your two assumptions

[felipecrs]

Use overrides to change the menu icon.

But I thought I could also use overrides to change the unmute too:

overrides:
  condition:
    microphone_connected: true // <----------- Does not exist
  menu:
    buttons:
      microphone:
        icon: mdi:phone-in-talk-outline
  live:
    auto_unmute: all // <--------------------- Unmutes incoming audio

No?

[dermotduffy]

No?

I'd need to test it, but I think if you did that it would work in all "future" situations as you want -- but for the camera that is already selected it won't do anything (since when the camera was first selected, the auto_unmute was 'never').

[felipecrs]

I'd need to test it, but I think if you did that it would work in all "future" situations as you want -- but for the camera that is already selected it won't do anything (since when the camera was first selected, the auto_unmute was 'never').

Got it.

[CV8R]

Exactly what I need, following.

[mutasim]

+1 🙏

[dermotduffy]

Quick update: This feature is 2nd in line, I just have very limited development cycles. I don't think this will be difficult. Whilst I could do it via automations (as suggested in my comment above) I think it's better that the card just support this natively, i.e. this should really just work out of the box.

Current plan:

• Extend the existing live.auto_unmute and live.auto_mute options for the live player to support a "microphone" option. When the microphone is unmuted, the audio would be unmuted also. The audio would automatically re-mute 60s after the last microphone unmute.
• [Optionally] Extend the live.microphone section to have a auto_mute_seconds option that would allow the 60s above to be configurable.

Nit: This does split microphone relevant config options across two config sections, but I think combining with the existing auto_mute and auto_unmute options is the least surprising.

I haven't tried implementing any of this, so the plan may change, but that's what I'm thinking for now. If anyone has a reason the above wouldn't suit their usecase, please let me know!

[dermotduffy]

Will be in the next release.