I Hijacked My Jabra Evolve2 Headset’s Buttons Back From Microsoft Teams

About a year ago, I bought the Jabra Evolve2 30SE to improve my online calls. Since I work remotely, It’s important what I want to say, is properly conveyed to everyone. I previously used a pair of AirPods Pro but it was showing its age and multiple people notified me they were hearing low quality, muffling sound. The Jabra Evolve2 has been a massive improvement. It sends clean and mostly noise-free high quality audio and is perfect for online calls (or even call centers). But there was one problem, the headset had some buttons exclusively for Microsoft Teams which had no usage for me.

All my meetings are either on Zoom or on Google Meet those buttons did nothing on regular macOS. So I decided to fix it one evening.

TLDR: I created an app to remap those keys to my preference

The mute button on my Jabra headset did nothing on my Mac, so I built an app to fix it

Though I don’t like to spend much on meetings as I’m an advocate of async work, however, when I do join calls, they are important ones. Slack huddles, Google Meet, the occasional Zoom. My headset is a Jabra Evolve2 30 SE, and I like it a lot. Comfortable, sounds good, and it has a dedicated mute button right on the right earcup.

There was just one problem. The mute button did nothing.

Press it, and a voice in your ear says “muted”. The little LED turns red. It feels like it worked. But it works only inside in apps like Microsoft Teams. Meanwhile, your Mac keeps listening like nothing happened. Everyone on the Google Meet call can still hear you as the mic won’t work there.

Why the button does nothing

Here’s the thing I learned after digging in. Jabra headsets only send the mute signal to your computer during an active call. Not a “call” as you and I understand it, but a call in the headset’s own protocol. Softphones like Microsoft Teams speaks this protocol. They tell the headset “a call is active”, and only then does the mute button start talking to the computer.

Google Meet runs in a browser tab. Slack huddles too. Neither of them speaks Jabra’s protocol. So the headset thinks you are idle, and the button press never leaves the headset. It mutes the headset’s own mic locally and that’s it. The Mac has no idea.

That felt like something a small app should be able to solve. So I built one.

Meet Jabra Mic Mute

It’s a tiny native macOS menu bar app. Here’s what it does:

• The mute button now mutes your Mac’s microphone at the system level. It works in Google Meet, Slack, FaceTime, Discord, OBS, anywhere.
• An overlay appears on screen every time you toggle, like the volume bezel. Red slashed mic for muted, green mic for on. You always know your state.
• The menu bar icon turns into a red badge while muted.
• The headset’s own LED stays in sync with the real microphone state. When the light is red, you are actually muted. Finally.
• Bonus: the middle multifunction button that previously opened Microsoft Teams, it’s now remappd to Apple Music. Also, it knows when music is playing or not. If not, it simply opens the Apple Music app. and If music is already running, the button doubles as play and pause.

How it works

The trick is simple to describe and was painful to get right. The app tells the headset that a call is always active. It sends the same signal Teams sends. From that point on, every mute press reaches macOS, and the app flips the mute on your default input device through CoreAudio.

The painful part was the handshake. If the headset drops the fake call and you don’t acknowledge it properly, it goes silent and ignores you. Getting that state machine right took a whole evening of staring at HID event logs. The app now handles it, including across sleep and wake.

A fun detail: I built the whole thing with Claude Code. I described what I wanted, we debugged the headset’s quirks together by reading its raw USB events, and the app took shape in one sitting.

What it costs you

Nothing. It’s free and open source under AGPL. The binary is under 1 MB. It’s native Swift, so no Electron, no Jabra Direct, no background junk. It needs macOS 13 or later and runs on both Apple Silicon and Intel.

Setup is quick:

1. Download the zip from the releases page and move the app to Applications.
2. Right-click and choose Open the first time, since it’s not notarized.
3. Grant Input Monitoring when macOS asks. That’s how the app sees the button presses.

Have a different Jabra model?

I tested on the Evolve2 30 SE, but the app matches any Jabra USB device and uses the standard protocol Jabra ships across the lineup. So the Evolve and Evolve2 series, Engage, and the Speak speakerphones should work too. If a button on your model behaves differently, the app has a debug mode that logs every press. Open an issue on GitHub and I’ll try to help.

If you own a Jabra headset and a Mac, give it a try. Muting yourself should be one button, and now it is.