Talk Small

Preface:

Due to recent events (COVID-19), everyone started working remotely, completely. Effective ways to communicate with your team while working becomes not just essential but necessary.

As a developer, I spend majority of my day working inside my IDE. It's a software with which I'm quite fluent. I think it's true for many developers. With the shift in how we work, I think our tools need an upgrade as well. After all, we are as efficient as our tools.

Idea: Talk Small

A Push to Talk (PTT) client, built on top of Jitsi, right inside Visual Studio Code.

Talk Small's purpose is to provide a persistent communication channel. You use it only when you want to broadcast/reply. Like a HAM Radio, but for VSCode. You can be free in your creative space. No more muting yourself after speaking. Or worse, forgetting muting yourself even after speaking.

If you played multiplayer games, you may have used in-game audio chat solution. Or maybe discord. It's a game changer! Haha.

Talk small is similar to it. You host/join a room. But your audio is sent only while you hold the spacebar key or the microphone button. Unlike an open-mic.

There are some alternatives like Live Share by Microsoft and Code With Me by JetBrains that are built mainly for active sessions.

Use cases:

1. Push to Talk can be helpful in time-bound collaborative team tasks, like remote hackathons, where all team members are communicating with each-other quite often.

2. As remote stand-up meeting client. Since stand-up meetings are usually short, and you chime in only when needed, you can do it right from your editor.

3. As @ThisIsJohnBrown suggested during the hackathon, it can be that "war room" during releases for easy communication, which is basically just everyone sitting muted on a call.

Installation:

1. Visit the Extension Page on Visual Studio Marketplace, and install.

2. Only for macOS users with Mojave or later

   • macOS Mojave introduced Microphone Permission for Apps. For obvious reasons, VSCode does not enlist that it needs microphone. Hence extensions hosted inside it can not access the microphone either. There's no API in VSCode Extension SDK to ask for microphone permission as well. For the curious.

   • As a workaround, please open vscode from your terminal. You'll be asked to allow Terminal to access Microphone. You have to accept ONLY that.

   • BEWARE: THIS WILL ALLOW MICROPHONE ACCESS TO ANY COMMAND YOU RUN FROM THAT TERMINAL. I DO NOT RECOMMEND IT IF YOU DO NOT KNOW THE CONSEQUENCES.

Privacy Statement:

Extension:

This extension stores

1. The name of last connected room (for quick reconnection)
2. Your display name (for convenience)

Everything that is stored by the extension is on your local machine.

Jitsi

The extension uses Jitsi as backend to provide communication. Read Jitsi's Privacy Policy.

Screenshots:

1. Configure your Display Name

   

   • Open Settings
   • Search "Talk Small"
   • Change Display Name

2. Connect

   • Using talk-small:connect command

     

   • Using Connect button in talk-small view

     

   • Disconnection can be done the same way, i.e. via talk-small.disconnect command or via Disconnect button in talk-small view

3. Enter optional room name

   

   • The input will be prefilled with last used room name for quick access
   • If this input is left empty, the extension will generate a random room name for you

4. Enter required password

   

5. Connected

   

6. Push to Talk

   

7. Example conference

   

Links:

• Project
• Issues