Your callers are right, and your instinct about hands free calling is too. Factory side note on why this matters so much: an ear level mic is close to the worst possible place to pick up your own voice. It’s far from your mouth, it hears the room, and on top of that the call link often narrows the audio bandwidth. Phone mic near your face wins every time.
On the fix, one distinction usually explains the “setting doesn’t stick” mystery. The default microphone toggle governs regular cellular calls. App calls, WhatsApp, Teams, KakaoTalk and friends, request their own audio route and will happily grab the hearing aid mic again. So test a plain phone call first. If the phone mic holds there but fails inside apps, it’s the apps, and inside each app’s call screen you can usually switch the audio source to Phone during the call.
Two more things worth checking on Samsung. That default mic choice sometimes resets after the aids reconnect, so re check it after a day of use before trusting it. And if all else fails, switching the in call output from your aids to Phone mid call forces both directions off the aids at once, blunt but reliable.
@woodong I have Resound Vivia ’s and a Galaxy A36 and, until recently, it behaved as I think you are describing. On calls, the option to “Select Phone Mic” would appear and could be selected, but the phone wouldn’t actually switch. The hearing aid mic would remain the active mic which was unsatisfactory. The fix suggested by Resound was to switch out of LE audio to () for calls, which worked, but was cumbersome.
In the past few months, Samsung has updated One UI a couple of times. The phone is now running Android 16 with One UI 8.5, and the phone now functions as it should, just as @user990 describes. I’m pretty sure, but not positive, the fix came with the upgrade to One UI 8.5. If your phone has been updated to One UI 8.5, then follow @user990’s method and I think it should work for you.
I also made the same settings, but it doesn’t work.
To “really” get the phone microphone to work,
First, set the “Microphone for calls” to “Hearing Aid Microphone.”
Then, when a call starts and a notification appears in the top pop-up asking “Do you want to switch to the phone microphone?”, you must press the “YES” button for the phone microphone to function properly.
My settings for The Galaxy A36 5G, 5.4, Android 16, One UI 8.5
Hearing Aids On (out of charger)
Tap Settings
Tap Connections
Tap Bluetooth
Tap Settings (gear symbol) for Hearing Aids
Tap Default Settings for Calls
Select “Phone Microphone”
Select Off for “Get notifications to Change…”
Select “Done”
Phone now displays after step 4
Default microphone for calls:
”Phone microphone”
The phone stays in this mode. On calls, the phone mic is used by default, and the audio is streamed to the hearing aids. No switching is required.
Edit: I think new to One UI 8.5, at the bottom of the hearing aid settings page there is now a selection for “Hearing aid type” Mine is in the “” mode vs a selectable “” type.
I see from your original post you have two top tier Samsung phones. It seems to me that both should work, yet neither one does, right? Oticon lists the Intent as fully “compatible” with your phones, If neither works, perhaps it’s the hearing aids themselves, or the app. Maybe you should call or email Oticon support for an opinion.
You might also consider starting a new thread with “Oticon” in the title to catch the attention of other Oticon users or retitle this thread.
The reason it won’t stick is worth knowing, because it means you didn’t do
anything wrong. A setting that sits there and does nothing is more annoying than
not having it at all.
Under a call isn’t one stream, it’s a configuration both ends agree on
at the moment the call starts. The phone can only offer downlink to the aids plus
uplink from the phone mic if your aids advertise that they’re able to run that
way. If the Intent only offers the two way conversational configuration, the
phone has no legal option to honour your preference, so it either ignores it or
asks you at call time. That popup isn’t a workaround you stumbled onto, it’s the
phone falling back to a second configuration because the first one wasn’t on offer.
Which fits what Jay is seeing. Same One UI, same version, different aids,
different behaviour. That’s the tell that this sits on the aid side rather than
with Samsung.
A couple of things you can do rather than wait on anyone.
Borrow the one step of Jay’s path you haven’t tried yet: set Phone Microphone,
then turn off get notifications to change, then make a call. If the phone mic
holds with the popup gone, your setting was fine all along and the notification
flow was eating it. If it falls back to the aid mics, you’ve proved the Intent
doesn’t offer that configuration and you can stop chasing settings altogether.
Either answer ends the guessing, and that’s worth more than another week of
combinations.
If pressing YES on every call is wearing you down meanwhile, hands you the
phone mic by force, because ASHA carries no microphone at all. You give up some
quality for it, and I know the advice here has been to stay on LE, so treat it as
somewhere to switch for a call that matters rather than somewhere to live.
Either way it’s worth putting to Oticon rather than Samsung: does Intent firmware
advertise a phone mic conversational configuration at all. If it doesn’t, no
amount of settings work gets you there and it’s a firmware item.
I don’t have Intent’s firmware in front of me, so take that as the factory side
reading of the symptom rather than something I can confirm.
Have we checked the firmware version on the Intents? 1.3.0 introduced , 1.3.1 and 1.4.0 came with stability fixes and general improvements. I think at least 1.3.1 would be good to have.
Please check your phone Android version. If you joined the Android 17 Beta, it might cause issues: Android 17 has reworked its underlying audio router. Many people are complaining that some devices frequently disconnect or fail to connect.
Change the default setting under the device setting menu “use phone microphone". The pop up selection menu during phone call is a little bit weird, sometimes it doesn’t work.
SoCal
