Setting your microphone level in Windows

Where the input volume and Microphone Boost sliders live, what to set them to, and why boost can make things worse

UPDATED 2026-07-28

Your microphone level is a Windows setting, not a Blabb one. Blabb records whatever Windows hands it, so if you are coming through too quietly this is where you fix it — and Blabb cannot change it for you.

The Volume slider in Settings#

This is the one most people need, and it is the easier of the two places.

Open Settings → System → Sound.
Under Input, click your microphone.
On the Device properties page, find Volume and drag it.

Set it near 100 to start with. This is not a speaker volume, so there is nothing to be gained by leaving yourself headroom: a signal that arrives too faint costs you accuracy far more often than one that is a little hot.

While you are on that page, speak and watch the level meter move. If it barely twitches with the slider at 100, the microphone is either too far away or the wrong device is selected. Go back to choosing and placing your microphone before touching anything else.

The Levels tab, and Microphone Boost#

Some devices have a second, separate gain control that the Settings app does not show. It lives in the classic Sound control panel:

Press Windows + R.
Type mmsys.cpl and press Enter.
Go to the Recording tab.
Right-click your microphone, choose Properties, then the Levels tab.

You get two sliders there: Microphone, which is the same gain as the Volume slider in Settings, and Microphone Boost, which is extra amplification applied in the driver.

Start with Microphone near 100 and Microphone Boost at 0. Only if you are still too quiet, raise boost by +10 dB, try a dictation, and stop as soon as you are loud enough. Boost is a blunt instrument: it amplifies the room along with your voice, so +30 dB on a laptop turns the fan and the air conditioning into something the speech model has to listen through.

Note

Microphone Boost comes from the sound driver, not from Windows itself, so plenty of devices do not have it at all. If the Levels tab shows only one slider, there is nothing wrong — your device does not offer boost, and the Volume slider is your only gain control.

Windows boost and Blabb's own gain control#

Blabb has Automatic gain control in Settings → Voice input, on by default. The app describes it as "Evens out loud and quiet speech. Turn off if you notice stray words." It works differently from boost: it reads your voice at the start of a stretch of speech, works out one gain from that, and holds it for the rest of that stretch. Anything too quiet to be speech cannot set the gain at all.

That matters for how the two stack. Driver boost chases whatever it is given, so it lifts the room noise in your silences towards your speaking level. Blabb's gain does not chase the noise floor — but a gain chosen for a quiet voice is still applied to everything in that stretch, room noise included. Pile heavy boost underneath and you can end up with a stray word appearing in a gap where you said nothing.

If that is happening to you, turn one of them down. Which one depends on where you are:

What you notice	What to change
Stray words in the gaps, and Microphone Boost is above 0	Lower the boost first — it amplifies the room hardest
Stray words, and there is no boost to lower	Turn Automatic gain control off in Settings → Voice input
Still too quiet everywhere, at 100 with no boost	The microphone is too far away, not too quiet — move it closer

Change one thing at a time, and do a real dictation between changes. Two adjustments at once tells you nothing about which one helped.

When it is not the level at all#

If Blabb hears nothing whatsoever, the level is a red herring — Windows is more likely blocking access to the microphone entirely. That has its own symptom and its own fix: see Microphone blocked.

For the general Windows-side problems — a device that does not appear, a driver that stopped working, an app that has been denied access — Microsoft's own walkthrough is more thorough than anything worth repeating here: Fix microphone problems.