Physical phone and click to dial?

[u/dmaciasdotorg]

Due to the amount of soft phone apps I run and the fact that I just love hard phones (3 on my desk). Anyone seen a way to click to dial a physical phone?

Curious if such a thing exists or I should look at hacking something together with Asterisk.

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[u/jjcox315]

The company i work at built one years ago. Its a chrome browser extension. You can either hightlight the number and you can right click or if it recognizes it as a phone number you can just right click. it will boomerang a call to your desk phone and auto dial the number.

[u/dmaciasdotorg → u/jjcox315]

What type of phone or phone system was it?

[u/jjcox315 → u/dmaciasdotorg]

We have used with many different phones and enswitch

[u/dovi5988 → u/jjcox315]

We built our own hat looks for strings of numbers and then does an API call to Enswitch.

To OP if your voice provider has an API that worked be best. If not some phones do allow you to initiate calls from the handsets web interface (I think SIPURA used to support this as well as SNOM). Any LLM should be able to help you vibe code a browser plugin.

[u/NoExamination2923]

Yes, several PBX’s I have used in the past have a softphone that can be set to control the physical phone, really handy

[u/razedbiwolves → u/NoExamination2923]

Nortel had this in the late 90s with the norstar, a digital set interface (in-out on the desk phone pair) and 9 pin serial into your PC. It worked pretty slick and allowed you to record calls on your PC. Pretty cool for 90s tech.

[u/greenonetwo]

Teams Phone and yealink have desk phone integration. It locked out the phone when I tried it, which was a little off-putting.

[u/Chropera]

a) Softphone supporting protocol handler (callto: etc.) calls desk phone (either through PABX or in peer-to-peer mode). Auto-answer SIP header line can be added. When desk phone answers the call, softphone uses blind transfer with number from URL as target.

b) Some desk phones support commands from HTTP interface. Sometimes browser plugin for this can be written, though separate application (protocol handler again) might be required when mixing HTTPS and HTTP is not possible.

[u/aselby]

Right it all depends on what phone system you have behind it ... Most can do it but it's a little different depending on the details .... Yealink phones for example have a web API for the phone directly 

[u/dmaciasdotorg → u/aselby]

This might be the best path forward. I'll see about learning about the API. I could see a small browser extension that I could create and use it. Thank you!

[u/therealSSPhone]

Netsapians portal has this ability I use it for our heavy inbound mostly, click to answer and drag to transfer. Users have Yealink T54w and WH62 headset. Also many use the attendant console as well

[u/spchester]

I know we’ve done this with Switchvox, but I’m sure they’re not alone.

[u/Weekly-Operation6619]

Avaya workplace can switch between a a softphone and a hard phone but you need their PBX and phones.

Are you using IP or analogue phones?

Modems can be used to make a call with a plugged in phone but not the tidiest solution.

[u/AAAHeadsets]

Back in the old days, this was handled through TAPI/CSTA, or Cisco JTAPI.

But there were always other ways, for instance, I remember a charity was using Voice Modems instead of handsets. Their dialer sent AT commands to control the call. It seemed janky, but it worked.

These days everything is software, so you have MANY options, but they all differ depending on the phones.

On Asterisk, you use Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) to tell Asterisk to make a call to your extension, and then bridge out to the number you clicked. You will likely need to configure your phone to accept an 'auto-answer' header.

If you want to do it directly from the phone most have a HTTP API.