UniVoice 4.3.0: Easy Push To Talk

Push to Talk is a popular feature to:

* Encourage users to user voice chat more intentionally

* Reduce CPU and bandwidth usage on both the client and the server

* Avoid excess chatter when connected to several peers as they'd all be transmitting audio without it

Old approach using VoiceSettings

UniVoice provides a VoiceSettings class that allows a client to mute or deafen a peer. 

In theory, this can be used to create a push-to-talk feature. However this isn't as straightforward.

After modifying VoiceSettings, you need to call SubmitVoiceSettings() to sync it with the server. The server then makes sure that the audio you send to it doesn't get sent to anyone.

Usage would be like this:

session.Client.YourVoiceSettings.deafenAll = true;

session.Client.SubmitVoiceSettings();

This isn't too bad, but there are a couple of limitations:

* Syncing the settings with the server takes a while, so it's not as instantaneous.

* The client still continues to send audio to the server, it's just that the server doesn't send it to anyone else which does leads to muting, but this consumes bandwidth on the client and uses the resources of the server.

New approach using ClientSession

For this reason in version 4.3.0 two new properties have been added to the ClientSession class.

These are:

* InputEnabled

* OutputsEnabled

Setting InputEnabled to false would cause the ClientSession to simply ignore the audio that's being captured on the local device. This means the device doesn't consume CPU resources running any filters and doesn't send any audio data over the network, saving bandwidth.

Setting OutputsEnabled to false ignores any incoming audio from other peers. This can be used to mute others easily. However, this doesn't stop data from being received by the client which still consumes bandwidth. So use this when you need to mute incoming audio instantly and for a short amount of time. Otherwise VoiceSettings is better.

The commit with the code changes is here

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