Detect when audio is active

[Kahn]

I've not looked into what APIs might be available but I would love to have the AFK detection be able to detect when I'm on a video conference and listening / speaking versus actually AFK. Given the various audio privacy features I'm hopeful we can find some hooks to check for active programs bound to a mic input versus just speaker output.

It might be sane to say if a microphone is present AND it's bound to an application then extend the AFK timeout to say 30 minutes. This wouldn't really cover webinar style one way presentations but at least we can get halfway there :)

[ErikBjare]

If you want to build this I'd suggest you do this as a separate watcher, especially due to the many cross-platform concerns.

We already do something similar for the web watcher, but it isn't yet taken into account in the Activity view (although there is an old PR that partially implements it).

Extending the AFK timeout is not the right way to do it, then any >30min meetings would be completely marked as AFK.

[ErikBjare]

This has been discussed before btw, either in issues or on the forum. You might want to search for those discussions.

[corradio]

Is this being worked on somewhere? This would be immensely helpful.

[jifalops]

Bump. I went afk with youtube music playing and it logged several hours on the most recent chrome tab (linux+extension).

Bravo on not getting tripped up by "installed" chrome apps like RescueTime did. I only found Activity Watch through a popular stack overflow question, and I had spent days searching and trying things. (I initially was looking for a "time tracker" which turns out to usually mean stopwatches and project management, I just wanted an easy way to log how I spent my time.)