I show off how to do this exact thing on this episode of the BuiltOnAir podcast.
You can definitely do this, but you'll need to use a few external apps to make this happen, and it will take you a little while to setup.
The main problem you're dealing with here is that automations have no control over your computer screen — automations can only update data "behind the scenes".
So you can see the newly-updated data on your screen, but an automation can't take control of your screen.
An automation can't move things around on your screen. It can't scroll a window, it can't perform an onscreen search, it can't move windows around, it can't give you a notification alert sound or a notification alert dialog box, it can't pop stuff up on your screen, nor move windows around.
An automation can't even do something as simple as automatically opening up a new browser window on your screen which takes you to the person's record in Airtable.
So in order to make this happen, you would need to find an app that can control your computer — but that app must also have a very specific feature. It must have its own built-in webhook server that you can send incoming data to.
I don't know if this sort of program exists for Windows, because I use the Mac.
But on the Mac, possibly the only program that offers full control of your Mac — along with an incoming webhook server — is Keyboard Maestro.
I'm not sure if there are any other programs that offer this, but there is another app called Pushover that can provide alert notifications on all of your devices (but it can't control your computer).
Additionally, you would also need to use another app as well: Make.
So to start with, you would need to use Make's RingCentral modules to monitor for incoming calls.
Then, when an incoming call comes in, you would trigger any macros that you have setup in Keyboard Maestro to take control of your Mac and perform the search in Airtable for you on your screen.
This would take me way too long to type up how to do this here, so you can check out the podcast to see how it's done!
HOWEVER:
What would be significantly easier — and would only require using Make — would be to just create a special view in Airtable that is filtered to show you only the people that you've checked off with a checkmark (or something like that).
When an incoming call comes in, Make would just check that person's checkbox for you behind the scenes.
Then, you would manually go to your filtered view, and you would see the person that is currently calling. When you're done talking with them, you would uncheck the checkbox to remove that person from the filtered view.
p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld
