Pixel 7 -Microphone Stops When Using Earbuds

[Jx J]

On my Pixel 7, the microphone sometimes stops when I switch to using the bluetooth earbuds.

This is really annoying as I prefer to listen with the earbuds for privacy & the earbuds don't have a microphone, so using the phone microphone makes perfect sense.

I would expect to see a system setting that allows me to set the system microphone as the built in one and to NEVER allow it to be changed by any app. That would make it reliable.
However, I cannot see any such setting.

Any suggestions on how to proceed ?
I am not keen on doing a factory reset, due to all the faffing around to get everything else back to where it was.
I just wish these companies would engineer products properly.

Android 14

 

[B. Diddy]

Just curious, which earbuds do you have? I've never seen a pair of BT earbuds without a mic.

 

[Jx J]

Just curious, which earbuds do you have? I've never seen a pair of BT earbuds without a mic.

Thank you for this enlightenment.
Apparently my blue tooth earbuds do have a mic.
There's no visible evidence of one & I bought them for listening to podcasts, with zero interest in using the mic !

Having done some tests with the phone recorder & me in a different room to the phone, clearly it uses the earbud mic when the earbuds are connected.

So I suppose that means there is a possibility of intermittent problems with the earbud mic when I try to make calls.
I would still rather have the option of a setting that uses the phone microphone at all times.

 

[B. Diddy]

From what I've seen in fairly recent posts in Reddit, there's no good solution, at least on Pixels.