The Problem
Anyone who has watched a movie on a video call knows the dance. Someone presses play. The movie audio bleeds into the microphone. Everyone can hear both the movie and each other talking over it. Someone asks "can you hear me?" — and you can, but only barely.
We built Smart Mic to fix this.
How It Works
Smart Mic listens to the video player's `play` and `pause` events and automatically adjusts your microphone:
The debounce matters. Without it, seeking through a video would cause rapid mute/unmute cycles that feel jarring.
Why 500ms and 300ms?
We tested a lot of values. 500ms on play is long enough that quick scrubs don't trigger a mute. 300ms on pause feels almost instantaneous — you pause, you talk, it flows naturally.
We also tried making these configurable, but in testing, users almost never changed the defaults. So we kept them fixed and removed the complexity.
Disabling Smart Mic
If you want to talk over the movie (for commentary or reactions), you can disable Smart Mic in the BingeCall popup under Settings. Your preference is saved per-device.
The Underlying Event Hooks
Smart Mic hooks into the native HTML5 video element's event system — not Netflix or YouTube's custom players. This means it works the same way across all platforms, and doesn't break when streaming services update their UIs.