How @keyboardmaestro came to my rescue when my headset, a Jabra Evolve2 65, wouldn’t talk to my softphone, the Vodafone One Net Mac App

It all started with a headset recommendation by Vowe aka Volker Weber. Well initially it started with Vodafone refusing to sell us another ISDN line at our new office’s location. As probably most of you know, the ISDN standard is being phased out by all telecom providers here in Germany – and Vodafone was the only one, who kept ISDN alive a little bit longer. But not anymore.

Since I was hesitant to give up my beloved FRITZ!Box (which I forced to act as a dedicated ISDN telephone switchboard with some DECT phones due to our need for individual phone extensions) we had a short trial period with Sipgate which unfortunately wouldn’t cooperate with the above mentioned FRITZ!Box (Sipgate was totally helpful, the FRITZ!Box not so much).

So we ended up with Vodafone One Net Business a virtual telephone switchboard in the Cloud. The convincing factor was that in theory you could add your landline number (with a phone extension) to your mobile phone. But that also didn’t work according to plan because some features of your mobile phone would need to be cancelled to work with One Net Business properly – e.g. the (UltraCard-)SIM cards with the same mobile number as my iPhone in my Apple Watch and iPad Pro. A major bummer.

So we seemed to be stuck with forwarding our landline numbers to our iPhones when I gave the One Net Mac App a shot. That test with the iMac’s built in microphone and speaker went surprisingly well but a headset would ultimately be better – since my wife doesn’t like to liste to my one hour plus calls with our frontend developer in Mannheim. Since Volker Weber is an authority on headsets and many other topics, I bought his recommendation the Jabra Evolve2 65.

The Evolve2 65 has a dedicated button on the right ear cup which unfortunately only seems to work with Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business. In general that is no big deal, once I receive a call, I would put on the headset, Command + Tab to the One Net Mac App and then click on the answer call button. But it takes a few seconds and impatient callers may hang up.

Then I remembered that Keyboard Maestro could be triggered by USB device keys and on the first try I came up with the short macro above. Long story short: it works like a charm. Now when the softphone rings, I put on the Evolve2 65 and press the answer call button on the headset – such a pleasure. The only thing missing is a way to end the call. Unfortunately the One Net Mac Up doesn’t have a dedicated key combination to hang up. But I am optimistic that there might be a way for Keyboard Maestro to handle this situation too.