Choose your microphone

By default OpenWhispr uses whatever microphone your operating system is using. If that’s the wrong one — or if you’ve plugged in something better — you can choose explicitly.

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Choosing a device

Open Settings, then Preferences under App, and find Input Device. Pick a specific microphone from the list, or leave it on System Default to follow whatever your operating system is set to. The app confirms the current choice underneath — “Using: …” — and marks your machine’s own microphone as (Built-in).

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Prefer Built-in Microphone

There’s a separate setting called Prefer Built-in Microphone, and the app is blunt about why: “External microphones may cause latency or reduced transcription quality.” That reads backwards if you’ve bought a good microphone, so it’s worth explaining. The problem is usually not the microphone — it’s the link. Bluetooth headsets in particular switch to a low-quality, low-bandwidth mode when they’re being used as an input device, which is exactly what speech recognition is worst at. Your laptop’s built-in microphone, unglamorous as it is, is a clean wired input at full bandwidth. Rules of thumb:

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If no microphones are listed

The app will say “No microphones were detected” and point you at your system settings. That’s an operating-system-level problem rather than an OpenWhispr one — see my microphone isn’t working, which covers permissions per platform. If the list is populated but you get “Unable to access microphone,” it’s a permission rather than a device problem, and the same article covers it.

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Meetings use the same input

The microphone you choose here is the one used for dictation and for recording your side of a meeting. Capturing the other participants is a separate mechanism entirely — see capturing both sides of the call.

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Related

• My microphone isn’t working
• Improve accuracy
• Nothing was transcribed