Natively captures two independent channels: system audio, which is what the other people in the call are saying, and your microphone, which is only ever you. They fail for different reasons, so the first diagnostic step is working out which of the two is silent.
Play a video with speech in it and speak a sentence yourself. If the transcript shows your sentence but not the video, system audio is the problem. If it shows the video but not you, the microphone is. If it shows neither, start with the permissions section below.
System audio is silent
- macOS: system audio capture rides on the Screen Recording permission. Grant it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen Recording, then quit and reopen Natively — macOS does not extend a new permission to a process that is already running.
- Windows: no permission is involved, but the output device is. If the call is playing through a headset while Windows' default output is your speakers, the loopback capture listens to the wrong device. Match them.
- Both: if the other side is on a phone dial-in bridge routed through a device Natively is not listening to, there is nothing to capture. Check where the audio is actually coming out.
The microphone is silent
- macOS: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone, then restart the app.
- Windows: Settings → Privacy & security → Microphone has two separate toggles. The one people miss is Let desktop apps access your microphone, further down the page — the app-level toggle above it does not cover desktop applications.
- Both: an exclusive-mode capture by another app can lock the device. Close other conferencing or recording software and try again.
Audio arrives but the transcript is empty
This is a different failure and points at the speech-to-text layer rather than capture. Natively rotates between provider keys automatically and probes for silently-frozen connections, so a genuine provider outage usually recovers itself within a few seconds. If it does not, check that your provider key is valid and has quota — an expired key produces exactly this symptom, with clean audio and no words.
