I have a dumb work related chrome thing, i’d like to make it so that when a certain notification sound plays in chromium, my computer does a few things automatically for me

Does anyone know a good way to make this happen?

I imagine it’d have to be setup like:

when chrome starts playing audio && check if that audio matches soundfile.ogg && myscript.sh, but I don’t know any good cli utilities that could get something like that done, and if there are any better ideas!

edit: to avoid X/Y issues i’ve summarized the problem in full here:

  1. I have a work program, this notifies me if I get a call or email, the work program then presents an accept/decline page, and does not proceed until I either accept, decline, or it times out.
  2. I want it to do two different things depending on if it’s a call or email
  3. It provides no notification other than the sound and an “accept” button on the page
  4. I have a chrome window open that does nothing but this, and I never use chrome for anything else
  5. I want to automatically do various things when I receive either this call or email
  6. I want it to be broadly applicable rather than a script designed for the specific website giving me the notification (so not a chrome extension). This prevents me from having to update any code in the event that the backend changes dramatically, and even if the notification sound changes, i’d just record a new sound as the activation noise.
  7. The noise is always the same, and hasn’t changed for many years, and there is a distinct noise between calls and emails
  8. They never overlap, they never play multiple times at the same time, and they never make any noises other than those two. The noises are distinct.

These factors cause me to want to run a script once the noise is recognized, only if the noise is playing in a particular app. I’m using pipewire/hyprland on arch.

My current plan for isolating the noise is to do the following:

pactl load-module module-combine-sink sink_name=‘Work’ slaves=‘easyeffects_sink’

and then set chrome exclusively to play audio on work.

Then set a script to check the sink work for audio that matches what I want. That should be simpler than the other methods i’ve seen to isolate the noise.

  • CommunistOPEnglish
    38•3 months ago

    Is there anything wrong with that? Hahaha, it’s pretty similar but not quite that

    • Quazatron
      20•3 months ago

      Lazy people tend to be creative people, which is good, especially when confronted with boring activities.

      I’d solve it in hardware, maybe an ESP32 dongle with a mic pretending to be a keyboard.

      Seriously though, sounds like you need a more creative or fulfilling job.

      • CommunistOPEnglish
        7•3 months ago

        Yeah the most fulfilling thing about this job has been figuring out how to automate as much of it as possible while still pretending to be a normal worker. It’s pretty terrible, i’m going to switch to herpetology eventually, but can’t do that right now for various reasons I don’t want to get into on a public forum.

        I’m at the top of every performance metric because of my inclination to be lazy as fuck with it though, so, it works.

    • @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.orgEnglish
      4•3 months ago

      “So I work from home, but want to sleep play games, but if my boss pings me on teams I want an alarm to wake me up”

      Depending on your employer it could be well okay

    • marcie (she/her)
      3•3 months ago

      youre just thinking about it wrong. get an llm going, voice to text, and have a synthesizer copy your voice. 99% of your workload is now gone, no more endless meetings, and you got notes that can be quickly summarized.

      lets just hope that they dont ask you what 27 times 38 or something is. could maybe prompt it to say ‘Lets circle back around on that in an email’ whenever a complex question is asked, lmao

      • CommunistOPEnglish
        2•3 months ago

        I don’t have any meetings ever. An LLM really wouldn’t be able to do almost any of my work.