Alfred? Dial for me please…

I work mostly from a Mac from my home office. This means that most of my meetings are online and on the phone. So I use Skype a lot. I also use Alfred as an application launcher. Last night, I decided to explore the possibilities of further improving my productivity by having Alfred dial into my conference call meetings for me. It didn’t take too long to figure out, but I’ll share it anyway so it can take you even less time…

Since Alfred does not have any hooks into Skype, the trick is to use Web search. I added two commands, one to dial any phone number and one to dial into the 800 number for conference calls.

Here is how I configured Alfred, it’s pretty simple:

The call keyword will require you to enter a phone number. The search URL {query} parameter is substituted to the phone number you enter, making Skype dial that number.

For the conference call, it’s simpler. Since the phone number is always the same, I just hard-coded it in the search URL and assigned a new keyword (conference).

And that’s it. Now I can dial into any call using a keyboard shortcut…