It can't hear you

The failure that looks like rudeness. What to check, in order, in about thirty seconds.

A bot that has gone deaf looks exactly like a bot that is ignoring you. Work down this list.

In order

1. Are captions on? Not for you — for it. The bot turns its own captions on when it joins;

if that failed, it hears nothing at all. Your CC button is irrelevant to what it hears.

google-meet-provider.js:1617

2. Is the caption language right? See call language. Wrong language is

worse than no language, because it answers anyway.

3. Was it admitted late? If it waited in the lobby more than about ninety seconds, it spent

its caption retries against a page that had no caption button, and gave up right as the real

one appeared. It comes in permanently deaf and nothing watches for recovery. A rejoin fixes it.

vibeconf-app#497

4. Is it just being quiet? In a room with people who didn't ask for it, it stays quiet

until named. That's a mode, not a fault. Say its name.

Ask it something with a checkable answer — *"what did I just say?"* — and see whether it

answers the question you asked. Fluent but wrong means captions; silence means deaf.