The Elgato Stream Deck is a series of products that are basically a board of buttons with little LCD screens on each one. As the name implies, its main target customers are streamers, who often need quick access to buttons to control cameras, overlays, sounds, lighting, or special effects.

I am no streamer (ANGTFT), but I recently bought a Stream Deck Mini for productivity.

I work 100% remotely, and spend a lot of time on Zoom calls. I got sick of hunting for the audio and camera toggle buttons with my mouse in each meeting, as well as the race for the 'Leave' button at the end of a meeting.

The Stream Deck allows me to do these things without touching the mouse. The widely-used unofficial Zoom Plugin doesn't play nice with work's endpoint security software, so I just set up hotkeys on the Steam Deck to trigger Zoom's global keyboard shortcuts.

On the default profile, I also have other keys and macros for setting my Slack status, switching between local and production instances of our docs site, among other things.

I think it's been well worth the investment, if only because I can blindly toggle my microphone on/off during meetings! 🎉