Blind and attended transfer now work from a desk phone.
Two ways to hand a call to a colleague now work from a desk phone.
Blind transfer
Send the call and let go. The caller hears hold music while the other phone rings.
If your colleague answers, you are out of the call and they are in. If nobody answers, the call does not vanish into the air: it stays with you, and your phone is told the transfer did not go through.
Attended transfer
Call your colleague first, say who is on the line, then join the two. If they would rather not take it, you go back to the caller and nobody is stranded.
Under the hood
Because every call is two legs joined in the middle, a transfer is tidy. The system keeps the caller's leg, drops yours, and joins the caller to a new one. The caller never notices anything but a short stretch of music.
A phone asks for a transfer in a standard way, and the usual reading of that request is "you, go and call this other person." For a system that sits in the middle of every call, that is the wrong reading. Pidgin Talk takes the request as an instruction to itself and does the work on the caller's behalf.
What the log shows
A transferred call appears as two entries: the first conversation, and the one that followed. It is the honest picture of what happened, and it keeps "who spoke to this customer" answerable.
Next
One more big change before the year is out, and nobody using a phone will see it.