Bluetooth microphone is not working on Windows 11.

Hey folks - found this thread while dealing with this issue for the last several weeks.

It would appear some combination of Realtek driver updates and Windows updates creates this. I got a brand new laptop from work (Dell XPS) and mic on my Q35 Bose Headphones worked fine until all of the updates processed throughout the following 2 weeks after getting the laptop set up.

I can't do a lot of the steps in this thread without full admin permissions, so I decided to try the most logical first before bugging our IT person to help. I went to Dell's website and looked up the drivers for this laptop. There was a recommended driver for Realtek Audio. I downloaded that and installed it. This required removing the old drivers, restarting, installing the new drivers, and restarting one more time. When everything came back the headset was recognized and mic is working fine.

That was all I did, no messing around in device manager or deleting devices.

The only other thing I did was the step Amy mentioned a while ago at the beginning of this thread (checkbox in the more settings for Bluetooth). That didn't seem to change anything though, only getting those new drivers and replacing the other ones.

with elite 85, bluetooth dongle was the easiest and cheapest solution.

This may help some corporately managed users:

So my IT department has been troubleshooting this issue with our fleet of Dell devices, specifically this year we have encountered Bluetooth devices of several brands failing to register as an input device. (a few users couldn't connect anything) We took all known troubleshooting steps.

What finally was discovered is that our monitoring/antivirus provider (Sentinel) had a device control managing policy in place that had been rolled out recently, specifically an inherited device policy was blocking the Bluetooth RFCOMM protocol. (We think it was stopping the driver from updating/installing) Our IT director disabled the device policy to test, and all of our users were suddenly able to use their Bluetooth as input devices.

If you don't have a managed computer, I would still investigate any policies that may be pushed to your computer by security software or similar.

Good luck!

This is amazing -- the disappearing mic problem has been driving me nuts, and this helped solve it. THANK YOU! There should really be a button for this or this should be included into standard troubleshooting instructions...

If you go back to page 4 and 5, there is a solution for your problem. And you don't even have to spend any money on a dongle.

The fix that I've provided on page 4, still works untill this day. No dongle, no fails in updating windows, nothing. Everything just works, still this day.

So go have a look at that, if you don't want to spend money on a dongle :)

Good day!