Choppy and unintelligible audio when user uses iPhone + AirPods + enabled Voice Focus (WebAudio). iOS Safari, Chrome.

[ArtemZakharchuk]

What happened and what did you expect to happen?

I want to connect to the meeting from my iPhone with connected pair of AirPods and turn on the Voice Focus feature. But when I do these other participants hear choppy and unintelligible audio from me. Turning off VF doesn't help, the audio stays bad.
The issue reproduces in both the latest versions of amazon-chime-sdk-js (3.10.0) and amazon-chime-sdk-component-library-react (3.4.0) demo apps.

Have you reviewed our existing documentation?

• GitHub issues
• FAQs page
• README page
• Feature-specific guides

Reproduction steps

Steps for AWS chime demo app.

• Create a meeting by user1
• Join to meeting by user2 with iPhone + AirPods + enable Voice Focus
• when the user2 starts to speak, the user1 hears choppy and unintelligible audio, sometimes with voice distortion

Amazon Chime SDK for JavaScript version

3.10.0

What browsers are you seeing the problem on?

IOS Safari, iOS Chrome

Browser version

16.1, last one

Meeting and Attendee ID Information.

No response

Browser console logs

Sorry, it is hard to collect logs from iPhone but I will provide them if it really needed. The bug is easy to reproduce in the demo app. Thanks!

[devalevenkatesh]

Thanks for reporting this issue. I tested locally using reproduction steps in the JS SDK browser meeting demo and I think experience sometimes works fine but it also gets stuttered and choppy some times.

Tested on iPhone 12 iOS 16

Pretty much the experience is the same as you mention. I think this is due to the WebAudio experience with iOS Safari. iOS Chrome is also built on top of Safari so it shows similar results.

I will test with my teammates in a remote scenario if it is better or still same. Also, will try different mobile browsers based on support.

In general, Web Audio and AudioContext have shown browser issues in Safari. I found one WebKit bug which closely matches this issue, but it does not mention Safari iOS 16 though:
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=221334

Amazon Voice focus (VF) uses Web Audio and thus turning just voice focus not solving it indicates that the issue is more related generally to Web Audio over VF.

Just to check, have you tried other WebAudio WebRTC based applications and whether have found similar experience?

[ArtemZakharchuk]

Just to check, have you tried other WebAudio WebRTC based applications and whether have found similar experience?
No, I haven’t tried other applications.

One more question regarding In general, Web Audio and AudioContext have shown browser issues in Safari.. Is this mean that just enabling WebAudio on iOS devices (even with disabled VF) is a potential source of audio problems?

Thanks for your response!

[devalevenkatesh]

Yes, in the reported issues and the #1059 most issues around iOS / Safari are related to WebAudio and not actually related to Amazon voice focus. Also, re-iterating the Amazon Voice Focus is based on Web audio.

[xuesichao]

I was able to reproduce this issue sometimes in JS SDK meeting demo, tried v3.15.0 - v3.18.2.
Steps are:

1. enable WebAudio
2. click “Continue” button
3. wait until video preview and audio preview fully load
4. click “Join” button
5. now we are in the meeting with VF disabled by default, Audio input is working properly
6. turn on VF from audio input device selection menu. Audio input now has robotic sound

Issue can be reproduced with or without connecting to a bluetooth device. But it's easier to reproduce the issue when connecting to a blue tooth device.

[xuesichao]

Closing this due to inactivity. Please reopen or submit a support case if this is still an issue.