Quick transfer shortcuts?

[sjlongland]

Hi all,

I might try tackle this myself at some point… but the situation is this. Sometimes you want to quickly palm off a call to a different extension. Maybe it's a blind transfer, maybe it's a interactive transfer; but it's always done the same way and always to the same extensions.

My specific use case right now is dealing with telephone scammers. I could just hang up, but I'd like to send them to an extension that wastes their time. (Said extension now is just a section of a song on permanent loop … but in the future it might be an Eliza bot or something with a voice engine in front. Or maybe Parry…)

Right now it pops up a dialogue and asks for the type of transfer and the extension, every time. You then are fumbling with choosing the extension and transfer type.

It'd be nice if there were a section where I could configure specific transfer targets, with a descriptive label and on the menus, I have a "Transfer To…" menu, with the sub-options being the specific common targets.

If others have some ideas, designs, etc… we can discuss them here.

[fbriere]

This somewhat reminded me of #21, which proposed the idea of scriptable plugins (albeit for SIP providers). If UI scripts were a thing, I imagine that end users would then be empowered to turn ideas such as yours into reality, all by themselves.

(Sorry, it would seem that I had fallen asleep into a nice dream for a brief moment.)

In the meantime, have you tried using the CLI, perhaps in combination with keyboard shortcuts? You could then run twinkle --cmd 'transfer XYZ' --immediate and banish those evil scammers to telephone hell with a single keystroke.

[sjlongland]

@fbriere I hadn't noticed the CLI options there… but maybe I can give those a shot, should be possible to code something up with my window manager (FVWM) to trigger it.

I guess a more generic scripting environment could make sense. Maybe it's worth having a look at what's available in the Qt ecosystem… Not QtScript as it seems that's no longer being developed. As much as I abhor JavaScript, the use case is perhaps "simple" enough to warrant using QJSEngine and QML.

Allegedly, we can provide some features via a QObject instance and expose it to the runtime through https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qjsengine.html#newQObject

(Heh, looking at issue #21 I see QML gets mentioned there too.) I suppose we need to figure out what we want to expose via the API and how the users might interact with it.

[sjlongland]

$ twinkle --cmd 'transfer 666' --immediate works brilliant.

[sjlongland]

This is the relevant part of my .fvwm/bindings file… in case others want to do the same thing with other window managers (the concept should carry over to others like OpenBox/FluxBox, TWM, MWM, etc)…

DestroyMenu WindowOpsMenu
AddToMenu WindowOpsMenu
+ "&Close"  Close
+ "&Move/Size"  Popup WindowMoveMenu
+ "Ma&ximise"   Maximize 100 100
+ "Sp&lit"  Popup WindowSplitMenu
+ "&Iconify"    Iconify
+ "&Switch" WindowList Root c c
+ "More &Ops"   Popup Window
+ ""        Nop
+ "To &Desk"    Popup GoToDeskMenu
+ "To Pag&e"    Popup GoToPageMenu
+ "&Quick Launch" Popup QuickLaunchMenu
+ "Root Menu (&A)" Popup RootMenu
+ "BarButtons (&Z)" GoToBarButtons
+ "&Telephony" Popup TelephonyOps

DestroyMenu RootOpsMenu
AddToMenu RootOpsMenu
+ "&Switch" WindowList Root c c
+ ""        Nop
+ "To &Desk"    Popup GoToDeskMenu
+ "To Pag&e"    Popup GoToPageMenu
+ "&Quick Launch" Popup QuickLaunchMenu
+ "Root Menu (&A)" Popup RootMenu
+ "BarButtons (&Z)" GoToBarButtons
+ "&Telephony" Popup TelephonyOps

DestroyMenu TelephonyOps
AddToMenu TelephonyOps
+ "&Show"       Exec exec twinkle --show
+ "&Answer"     Exec exec twinkle --cmd 'answer'
+ "&Reject"     Exec exec twinkle --cmd 'reject'
+ "&Hold"       Exec exec twinkle --cmd 'hold'
+ "R&Etrieve"       Exec exec twinkle --cmd 'retrieve'
+ "&Dump Caller"    Exec exec twinkle --cmd 'transfer 666' --immediate