Assistance with mic issues, please.

Hi there,

I am Natalia. I am a woman who is blind. I use screen readers, little pieces of software which read the screen to me, to navigate the internet and all aspects of my computer, in conjuntion with the keyboard. I recently obtained my HP PC about a month ago, which I have described as best I can in my profile. It appears that my OS version number is: 19042.630. This should be the latest version of Windows 10.

I am having issues with my mic. I switched my language and region from United States English, to U.K. English, soon after setting up my computer. I did this because I am moving to Ireland. I was not thinking about the language and region initially, when I set it up. Now, Cortana cannot hear me. I have made multiple adjustments to my settings and can get Cortana to work for a very brief period of time. I always end up spending a couple hours trying to fix the problem and as soon as I reboot, Cortana cannot hear me again. I do not know what is going on. However, I am becoming very frustrated. I have never figured out exactly what causes Cortana to finally be able to hear me until I reboot next time. So I end up going in and out of settings, enabling and disabling the Mic, turning on/off the wake word, checking and unchecking the box for granting permissions to Cortana to access my mic, going in and out of speech settings, etc. This has made me wish time and time again that I could just reset my Windows to default settings somehow and start over with a clean device. However, if I restore the computer to factory defaults, my Windows will probably wiped off. Microsoft has not changed that aspect of Windows, right? When all other computer systems, one can re-format the OS, without losing the OS itself. Cortana was working beautifully, prior to me switching my language and region to the U.K.

I was participating in a important Zoom meeting today, for work purposes. I was given the chance to ask a question of the presenters and when it came to my turn to speak, they could not hear me. I was extremely embarrassed and located the chat box fortunately, so I could type to the presenters. I looked at the settings afterwards and it seemed my mic settings were fine. I have a headset, which was plugged in, however it does not contain a mic. It seemed the mic was set to my HP microphone. So I'm at a loss there, too.

I am an instructor for the blind and visually impaired and am seeking work in Ireland. I need to be able to communicate on Zoom for work interviews and cannot have my mic settings changing constantly every time I restart the computer. I am a pretty patient person, however I've lots going on in my personal life at the moment as well and am finding it difficult to deal with this on top of everything else. Any help you can provide would be immensely appreciated.

Thank you so very much for reading. I hope all of you are staying healthy and as happy as possible,

Natalia

With the December patch-Tuesday, which was yesterday, you should be at 19042.685.
Glad that you were looking at going to Ireland. Looks like much of my ancestry is from there!

I don't understand why that is happening. It doesn't sound like a region-ban, because it works sometimes.

Thank you for replying! That's great your family are from Ireland!! It's an absolutely beautiful country and the people are amazingly kind!

I do not understand why this is happening either. I did not know there was a patch. I'll update to the latest version of Windows and see if that stabilises anything. I doubt it, however it's always worth a try.

Thank you,
Natalia

Natalia728 said:

Thank you for replying! That's great your family are from Ireland!! It's an absolutely beautiful country and the people are amazingly kind!

I do not understand why this is happening either. I did not know there was a patch. I'll update to the latest version of Windows and see if that stabilises anything. I doubt it, however it's always worth a try.

Thank you,
Natalia

Yep, an Irish-American. My mom's father and I believe my mom's-mom have ancestry from there.
Even my sister looks much the same, the same kind of thick brown hair, even when we were born blonde.
Looks like I have green eyes from my mom's-mom and same with the thick hair, which my sister says that it's hard to cut.