Overview of audio issues

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Audio quality is important in conference calls. If any participants on a call can’t hear each other well enough, then the participants likely leave the call. To establish a voice call with good quality, several factors must be considered. These factors include:

  • The users granted the microphone permission
  • The users microphone is working properly
  • The network conditions are good enough on sending and receiving ends
  • The audio output device is functioning properly

All of these factors are important from an end-to-end perspective.

Device and network issues are considered external problems from the perspective of the ACS Calling SDK. Your application should integrate the User Facing Diagnostics API to monitor device and network issues and display warning messages accordingly. In this way, users are aware of the issue and can troubleshoot on their own.

Common issues in audio calls

Here we list several common audio issues, along with potential causes for each issue:

The user can't hear sound during the call

  • There's a problem on the microphone of the speaking participant.
  • There's a problem on the audio output device of the user.
  • There's a network issue in the call

The user experiences poor audio quality

  • The audio sender has poor network connectivity.
  • The receiver has poor network connectivity.

The user experiences delays during the call

  • The round trip time is large between the sender and the receiver.
  • Other network issues.

The user experiences echo during the call

  • The browser's acoustic echo canceler isn't able to remove the echo on the audio sender's side.

The volume of the incoming audio is low

  • There's a low volume of outgoing audio on the sender's side.
  • There's an issue with the speaker or audio volume settings on the receiver's side