It's nothing new -- the keystroke permission is required to enable Push-to-Talk (PTT), where you press or hold a key to activate the microphone in audio calls/chats.
Admittedly Discord have been terrible at stating this, and don't have a simple FAQ or explanation for something that's been going on for over 3 years, but there's nothing nefarious going on.
They don’t force it, if you don’t allow it then the push-to-talk only works when Discord has focus.
The same thing happens in windows to some extent, especially if the app/game your using is running as admin then PTT won’t work unless Discord is also running as admin.
I suspect this is a UI decision rather than "we would like to spy". Say you're a person who wants to use Discord's special key commands (from other comments "push to talk" and similar?), then Discord can have a dialog that says "would you like to do this?" which is then followed by the linked dialog, or they can just use the OS dialog (to avoid double-dialog to the user). It seems that they've gone for the latter, but I think I've seen this which means they haven't done even the most basic usage gating (I've never used any kind of audio in discord, so PTT etc shouldn't be being attempted).
You could reasonably argue that this is an API shortcoming on macOS - there's no real way that I'm aware of to add a global key handler outside of accessibility APIs, and those APIs basically just let you do nothing or listen to everything and then filter the events in your app.
Of course they are. If I want PTT I have to enable it. Why? Let me do a keyboard shortcut for PTT while in-app. Let me push a UI button while app is focused. Give me alternatives. I have already been in group chats in Discord that enforce a "PTT must be enabled to talk" rule. Which I of course hate because I can't participate since I'm not willing to give keylogger access to all of npm.
What's the status for global push-to-talk for voice chat apps like Discord? Does that also fall under hotkeys/"no one working on Wayland today seems to care"?
This was also a big one for me. The best workaround I've come up with so far is to set up a global hotkey to toggle microphone mute in KDE, and then set my Discord (etc.) to have very sensitive "voice activation" settings. Essentially I've replaced push to talk with "push to toggle mute". Not the same thing, but I got used to it pretty quick.
Having read some of the threads on the freedesktop wayland gitlab repo about push to talk, I'm not confident push to talk or any other system for applications to register a global hotkey is something they'll deliver any time soon (if ever).
If I’m not mistaken, this is for a global push-to-talk shortcut that works even when Discord is not focused. Not sure if Apple provides an opportunity for apps to show a reason in the prompt.
I wish push-to-talk was more common. On linux I've been using this little python script that implements global push-to-talk by (un)muting the microphone in pulseaudio when you push a button. https://gitlab.com/somini/inpulse-to-talk
Time to see if there's something equivalent for mac.
For push to talk to work, you need to have access to keys even when you're not in focus.
That's not something doable today on the web for obvious security reasons, but it's possible for Discord that has a separate app, would be doable for Zoom too I guess.
Thanks. Didn't see that in zulip, but haven't used it 'for real' beyond a few demos a couple years back. I don't remember getting prompted in discord like that; is that a setting someone needs to enable?
The only reason you'd want to use push to talk is either you have a lot of people in the channel, you have a loud background or you don't want people hearing stuff not designated for the discord voice (if you're streaming, have irl people in the same room - that kinda stuff)
Would this imply you're using a globally available key to briefly talk, without having to see / switch to the voice app? I don't think I've seen or noticed that, if so, only "focus discord and hold a button to talk"... at which point I'm already looking at it there's nothing to track, personally.
If it's global though I can absolutely see why that's useful.
One sticking point for people might be the way push-to-talk works for the in-browser version; the shortcut to trigger it will only work when you have the browser window focused (I think due to limitations in how browsers can capture inputs when not focused, which is a pretty reasonable policy in general). Not only does this mean you'd need to alt-tab over whenever you want to push to talk (which isn't super easy for a lot of potential use cases, like gaming), but if I remember correctly from trying this out once, you can have even more jarring bugs like "alt-tab over to the browser to hit push-to-talk shortcut, hit the shortcut, alt-tab back before releasing so you can keep talking, and then having the push to talk never deactivate because the browser didn't detect the key-up event due to a different window having focus when it happened".
But you don't have push to talk, which is the killer feature for gamers. Proper push to talk will capture key presses even when the app doesn't have focus, the key difference with most other implementations.
And having that feature exposed to the web is a security nightmare. Unless you have a native app for your service, it's unlikely to ever have that functionality.
AutoPTT lets you customize how push-to-talk works in apps like Discord or online games. It can even press the button for you based on voice activity, in case the program does not support voice activation natively.
It's nothing new -- the keystroke permission is required to enable Push-to-Talk (PTT), where you press or hold a key to activate the microphone in audio calls/chats.
Admittedly Discord have been terrible at stating this, and don't have a simple FAQ or explanation for something that's been going on for over 3 years, but there's nothing nefarious going on.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035130231--...
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