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Audio is the single most important thing in a clinical session. Most audio problems have a one-step fix. Try the obvious thing first; the exotic causes are at the bottom of this page.

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Echo — you hear your own voice come back

Almost always the same cause: somebody (you or the client) isn’t wearing headphones, so their mic picks up your voice from their speakers and sends it back to you. Fix: Put on headphones. AirPods, wired earbuds, anything that separates the mic from the speaker. Ask your client to do the same. If the echo is on your side and you’re already wearing headphones, double-check that your laptop hasn’t switched the audio output to its built-in speakers (the macOS audio menu sometimes flips after a Bluetooth hiccup). Switch it back to your headphones.
Rivet enables WebRTC echo cancellation, noise suppression, and auto- gain control by default. They handle mild echo well, but they can’t fully cancel a client across the room with their phone on speaker — that’s a physics problem, not a software setting.

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One-way audio — they hear you but you don’t hear them

Two common causes, in order of likelihood:
1

The browser blocked their mic

Most common. The client tapped Join before granting microphone permission, the prompt got dismissed, and now their mic is muted at the browser level. Ask them to look for a mic-with-a-slash icon in the address bar, click it, and allow microphone access — then refresh the page and rejoin.
2

OS-level mute

On Mac and Windows, the keyboard mic-mute key (often F4 or a function row toggle) silences the mic at the OS level. The browser shows the mic as active but no audio reaches the call. Pressing the key again unmutes it.
If neither fixes it, ask the client to leave the session and rejoin — the most reliable recovery for a stuck audio track is closing the tab and tapping the waiting-room link again.

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Garbled or robotic voice

Almost always a bandwidth problem. WebRTC drops audio quality when the connection can’t keep up. Quick checks:
  • Are they on Wi-Fi? Ask them to move closer to the router. Wi-Fi strength drops sharply more than 15 feet from the access point.
  • Are they on cellular? 4G is fine; spotty 4G isn’t. If you can hear them clearly between drops, the network is the problem, not the hardware.
  • Is something else on the network downloading? A family member’s Netflix stream on the same Wi-Fi can saturate the link.
Fix: Move to a better network if possible. If not, both of you turn off your video — audio-only uses about a tenth of the bandwidth and usually stays clear when video can’t.

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Echo cancellation off — you hear yourself faintly

Some Bluetooth headsets (older Jabra, some Plantronics models) put themselves into a “music” profile when the browser starts a call. In music profile, echo cancellation is disabled because music doesn’t need it. Fix: Disconnect and reconnect the headset, or end the call and restart it. Both force the OS to renegotiate the audio profile, which usually drops the device back into the call-optimised “handsfree” profile.

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macOS sample-rate mismatch (the rare one)

If you’re on a Mac with an external audio interface (a USB mic, a Focusrite Scarlett, etc.), Audio MIDI Setup sometimes sets the device sample rate to 96 kHz while the browser expects 48 kHz. The result is choppy or pitched audio. Fix: Open Audio MIDI Setup (Spotlight → Audio MIDI Setup), select your input device, and set the Format to 48000.0 Hz. Restart the browser. Most users will never hit this — only Mac users with semi-pro audio gear see it.

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Nothing helps — end the call and use the practice line

If audio is genuinely broken and you have a session running, end the video call and call the client back on the practice line. Audio over PSTN is rock-solid in a way browser-WebRTC isn’t. You lose the visual, but the session continues. Reschedule a video session for next week and investigate the setup at your own pace.

Video issues

Camera-side problems — black screen, choppy video, wrong camera.

Client can't join

The client never reaches the session at all.