“Push to talk” (or PTT) unmutes your microphone when you press and hold down an assigned hot-key. By activating your microphone only when talking, it prevents any unwanted noises coming through, which makes it a great technique to use on voice calls.
Push to talk is not a system-wide Windows 10 or Windows 11 feature. Discord and some games provide it themselves, but many calling and recording apps only offer mute or voice-activity controls.
To help with this, we’ve compared applications that let you use push to talk in Windows regardless of the app receiving your microphone. If you need the microphone to stay open while reducing keyboard, fan, or room noise, see our Windows microphone-noise guide instead.
MicMute
MicMute is a free, open source program that lets you manage the volume level of a connected microphone via keyboard shortcuts. You can download the latest version here.
Features
- Configurable hotkeys.
- Can optionally display tray notifications when toggled.
- Can optionally play sound notifications—which are customizable—when toggled.
- Free and open source.
Limitations
- Keyboard shortcuts support a maximum combination of two keys.
- Mouse buttons cannot be assigned as shortcuts.
- Was last updated in 2015 and may have some unresolved issues .
Talk Toggle
Talk Toggle is a push to talk application we built and is available on the Windows App Store.
Features
Three different transmission modes:
- Push to talk: Microphone is muted until the hotkeys are held down.
- Push to mute: Microphone is only unmuted when the hotkeys are held down. Useful if you normally go open mic, but need some privacy every now and then.
- Toggle mute: Microphone switches between unmuted and muted when the hotkeys are pressed.
- Fully configurable shortcut that supports both keyboard and mouse button combinations.
- Can optionally play sound notifications when toggled.
Limitations
- Has a free trial, but is a paid app ($2.39 to unlock).
- Only supports Windows 10 (no Windows 7 or 8 support).
AutoHotkey
AutoHotkey is a little different. It is a free, open source program that lets you create your own keyboard shortcuts for a variety of actions within Windows. Due to its flexibility, it can be made to do a huge range of cool things , one of them being push to talk.
It requires much more setup than the previously listed options. Getting started is a bit trickier ; you’ll first need to learn the basics of AutoHotkey. This article does a great job ramping you up.
Once you understand how it works, you can either write your own, or load in and customize some community scripts that enable push to talk functionality. Here are two such scripts as a starting point.
Features
- Free and open source. Big community of existing scripts.
- Very powerful, can do much more than just push to talk.
- Completely customizable.
Limitations
- Requires setup and has a learning curve.