How to Use Your Phone as a PC Microphone and Speaker

The call starts in two minutes, and the built-in microphone on your laptop sounds like a fan with a voice somewhere behind it. The headset is in the other room, or its battery is flat. On the desk next to you sits a phone with a better microphone than the laptop, a pair of earbuds already paired to it, and a connection to the same Wi-Fi router.

The obvious question is why the phone can't just be the microphone. It can. Your phone can also be your computer's speaker, or both at once as a wireless headset. This guide explains how that works, what the usual options get wrong, and how to set it up with SoundPush, the free and open-source app we built for exactly this.

Four things your phone can do for your computer

People search for this problem in four different ways, and they are really four different directions for the audio to travel:

1. Your phone as a PC microphone. You talk into the phone, and apps on the computer — Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Discord, OBS — hear it as a microphone.
2. Your phone as a PC speaker. The computer's sound plays through the phone, and through whatever headphones are plugged into it.
3. Your phone as a wireless headset. Both directions at once: you listen to the computer and talk back through the phone.
4. Phone audio on your PC. The reverse. An app on the phone — a podcast, a music app, a voice memo — plays through the computer's speakers.

Most tools handle one of these. SoundPush handles all four from the same pair of apps, and you can start any of them from either device.

Why this is harder than it sounds

Sending audio from one device to another is easy. Making it useful takes more work.

The operating system has to believe the phone is a microphone. Zoom does not know about your phone. It only lists microphones the operating system knows about. So "use my phone as a mic" really means creating a virtual microphone on the computer and feeding the phone's audio into it. How you do that differs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Delay matters. For music, a quarter of a second of buffering is invisible. For a conversation, it makes you talk over people. A good tool lets you trade stability for lower delay depending on what you are doing.

Networks get in the way. Office, school, hotel and café Wi-Fi often keep devices apart from each other on purpose, a setting called client isolation. Two devices on the "same" Wi-Fi then cannot see each other at all.

And then there is trust. A lot of apps in this category route your audio through their own servers, require an account for something that never needs to leave the room, or pay for themselves with ads. You are letting this software near your microphone. That deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets.

How SoundPush approaches it

SoundPush is two apps: a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux, and an Android app for Android 8 and newer. They talk to each other directly over your own network or a USB cable. There is no SoundPush server in the middle.

You pair the two devices once by scanning a QR code. From then on every stream is end-to-end encrypted with QUIC and TLS 1.3, authenticated by keys the two devices exchanged during pairing. There are no accounts, no ads, no analytics and no telemetry. SoundPush does not record audio; it streams it live and stores nothing. The whole project is open source under the GNU General Public License, so you can read exactly what it does with your voice.

Under the hood it uses the same building blocks you would pick for real-time audio: the Opus codec, an adaptive jitter buffer, clock-drift compensation between the two devices, packet redundancy, adaptive bitrate, and RNNoise noise suppression for the microphone.

Setting it up

1. Install both apps

Open the SoundPush releases page on GitHub and download the file for each device: the .exe setup for Windows, the .dmg for macOS, a .deb, .rpm or .AppImage for Linux, and the .apk for your Android phone. Releases come with SHA256SUMS so you can verify the downloads.

2. Put them on the same network

Connect both devices to the same Wi-Fi. If that Wi-Fi is the kind that keeps devices apart, don't fight it. Use one of the two alternatives below instead: a phone hotspot or a USB cable.

3. Pair once

On the computer, choose Pair a device. A QR code appears, valid for five minutes. On the phone, choose Scan pairing code and point the camera at it. That's it: each device now lists the other under Paired devices.

No camera, or scanning isn't practical? On the phone, go to Devices → Enter address and type the computer's address, which the desktop app shows under Settings → About. Both screens then show a six-digit code. If the codes match, confirm on both sides. If they don't, cancel, because something on the network is interfering.

After pairing, the devices reconnect by themselves whenever they share a network.

4. Pick a task

Start any task from whichever device is in your hand:

On the computer	On the phone	What happens
Listen on phone	Listen to computer	The computer's sound plays on the phone
Use phone as microphone	Use as computer microphone	Apps on the computer hear the phone's microphone
Use phone as headset	Use as headset	Both: listen and talk through the phone
Hear phone audio	Send phone audio	Phone app audio plays on the computer (Android 10+)

Active streams show their elapsed time, quality and delay, with a Stop button. Connection details shows the codec, buffer, jitter, packet loss and drift if you want to see what is going on.

Using your phone as a PC microphone

This is the most common reason people look for a tool like this, and the only one that needs a little setup. The phone's voice has to reach a virtual microphone that your apps can select.

On Windows, open Audio → Install VB-CABLE in SoundPush. It downloads the official, Microsoft-signed VB-CABLE package from VB-Audio, checks it against a fixed checksum, and opens its installer; click Install Driver, then restart Windows when asked. In Zoom, Meet, Teams, Discord or OBS, choose CABLE Output (VB-Audio Virtual Cable) as the microphone. SoundPush's Audio page always shows the exact name to pick.

On macOS, choose Audio → Install SoundPush Microphone and enter your password. Nothing else is downloaded. In your app, pick SoundPush Microphone.

On Linux, a built-in SoundPush Microphone PipeWire device is on the way. If your version's Audio page says a virtual microphone is available, pick it. If it doesn't, your version doesn't have it yet.

Then start Use phone as microphone and talk. SoundPush never feeds your voice into a real speaker by mistake, because that would play you out loud while your call heard nothing. It only uses real virtual cables.

Using your phone as a PC speaker

This one needs no setup at all. Choose Listen on phone on the computer, or Listen to computer on the phone, and the computer's sound plays through the phone.

Two settings make it better. Mute PC speakers keeps the computer silent while it streams, so only the phone plays. That is how you watch a film at night through the earbuds in your pocket without waking anyone. Audio delay for lip sync lets you nudge the audio if a video looks slightly out of step.

You can also send the computer's sound and your voice together in one stream, each with its own level. That is commentary over a game or a film, with no mixer.

Using your phone as a wireless headset

Use phone as headset does both directions at once: the call's audio plays through the phone, and your voice goes back into the computer through the virtual microphone. With earbuds plugged into the phone, you have a wireless headset that goes wherever the phone goes, as long as it stays on the same network.

Wi-Fi, hotspot, or USB

SoundPush connects in three ways, and choosing the right one fixes most problems before they start:

• Home Wi-Fi. The default, and fine for most people.
• A phone hotspot. Connect the computer to the phone's hotspot. Useful anywhere the Wi-Fi keeps devices apart.
• USB. Plug the phone into the computer and turn on USB tethering in the phone's settings. The computer gets a direct network link to the phone and SoundPush reconnects automatically. USB gives the lowest delay, and it is the answer on busy or guest Wi-Fi.

Under Settings → Advanced you can also force the connection type: automatic, Wi-Fi only, TCP only for networks that block the fast protocol, or USB only.

Tuning latency and quality

The Latency setting is the one worth understanding:

• Low latency is for games and video, when the link is strong.
• Balanced is the default.
• Stable suits music, weak Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth headphones on the phone.
• Custom lets you set the buffer limits yourself.

Quality can adapt to the network automatically, stay at a fixed bitrate, or go lossless over USB or strong Wi-Fi. We haven't published end-to-end delay figures yet because they haven't been measured on enough real networks. We would rather not quote a number we can't stand behind.

More than one listener

One source can stream to up to eight devices at once, and you can set anything from one to sixteen in Settings → Advanced. SoundPush estimates the bandwidth and CPU another listener would cost before you add them. With more than one device connected, it always asks which one you meant, so your microphone never ends up somewhere you didn't expect.

Privacy, in plain terms

SoundPush's privacy model is short because there isn't much to it:

• Audio travels only between the devices you paired, encrypted end to end.
• When another device asks for your microphone, SoundPush asks you: Allow this time, Always allow, or Don't allow.
• Who can find your device on the network is your choice: everyone, paired devices only (the default), or nobody.
• The only other connections are an optional daily update check against GitHub Releases, and on Windows, the VB-CABLE download when you ask for it.
• Diagnostics are written to your own disk. Nothing is sent unless you attach it to an issue yourself.

When it doesn't work

• The devices can't find each other. It is almost always the network: guest or office Wi-Fi with client isolation. Use a hotspot or USB.
• The microphone doesn't appear in Zoom or Discord. Check that the virtual microphone is installed, and that you picked the exact name the Audio page shows. On Windows, restart after installing VB-CABLE.
• Audio crackles or lags. Move from Low latency to Balanced or Stable, or switch to USB.
• Something else? Every error message carries a stable code like SP-NET-004, listed with its fix on the project's error codes page, and the user guide has a troubleshooting section.

Why open source matters here

An app that sits between your microphone and the rest of the world is exactly the kind of software you should be able to inspect. SoundPush's shared Rust engine, Tauri desktop app and Kotlin Android app are all public, along with the protocol specification, the threat model, and the architecture decisions behind them. You can read the code, build it yourself, and follow what changes in each release.

It also means the project gets better in the open. SoundPush is young. If it misbehaves on your phone model or your Linux distribution, opening an issue is the fastest way to get it fixed for everyone.

Try it

SoundPush is free, with no paid tier and no account. Download it for your computer and your phone from GitHub Releases, pair them once, and your phone becomes the microphone, speaker or headset your computer was missing.

If you like tools that keep your data on your own devices, the rest of our desktop applications follow the same idea. So does ShotDock, our screenshot extension that never uploads a page.