If your breath isn't being heard
What to try, in order, when you see "No exhale was heard". Distance, the room, the difference between devices, and carrying on without the microphone.
6 min read
If the app can't hear your breath, the session still does you good, but the score becomes meaningless. The cause is usually one of a few things. Let's go through them in order.
1. Distance
This is the most common cause. Hold the device 20-30 cm from your mouth and nose.
If you laid it flat on a table, the microphone is most likely facing sideways rather than up. Propping the phone against a book, or holding it, makes a clear difference.
Know where the microphone is: on an iPhone it is on the bottom edge, next to the charging port. If your hand covers it, nothing is heard.
2. The room
There is a three-second measurement at the start of a session — while the screen says "Measuring the room…", don't talk and don't move. A sound in that moment is taken for room noise, and your breath becomes harder to hear.
A television, air conditioning, a fan, an open window: all of them raise the threshold. A quiet room is best.
3. Your exhale really being very quiet
Some techniques are quiet by nature. A breath out through a single nostril is the quietest of all, and Coherent and Deep and Slow are low too.
The app knows this and uses a different threshold for each technique. But it varies from person to person as well: some people's nasal exhale really is very quiet.
The fix is not to force the breath. Pushing to make the exhale stronger both spoils the technique and lowers the "breath volume" measurement. Bring the device closer instead.
4. If you are using a tablet
On a tablet the microphone sits further from your mouth, and your breath comes through noticeably quieter than on a phone. On a tablet the app picks the microphone nearest to you, but the gap doesn't close completely. Hold the tablet closer. Details: Soluklan on a tablet.
5. Look at what the report says
Under Detailed report there is an "Exhale peak level" line: something like "20 dB above the floor".
If that difference is under 10 dB, the sound really is too weak — work on distance and the room. If it is 20 dB or more, the sound is enough and the problem may be elsewhere (timing, for instance).
If the line isn't there at all, no measurable exhale was found in that session.
6. Microphone permission
If Breath detection (microphone) is off in the app's Settings, nothing is measured. If you denied microphone permission in iOS, the app says so and shows a button that takes you straight to iOS Settings.
You can do a session without the microphone
If none of this helps, or you simply don't feel like it, carry on without the microphone. If your breath isn't heard in the tutorial's practice step, a Continue without the microphone button appears. In the middle of a session, the option Continue without the microphone appears if the microphone warning comes up again in the same session. If you don't want to use it at all, turn the microphone off entirely in Settings.
In a session without the microphone no score is worked out, but the circle, the rhythm, the haptics, your streak, milestones and programs all work exactly the same. The report says it was a "session without the microphone", and the session still counts towards your streak.
One more thing
If the app doesn't hear your exhale for a while during a session, it shows a warning. If you are seeing the warning, the app really can't measure that exhale.
If you are on Apple Watch
The watch does not measure breath sound at all; measurement there rests on heart rate. So "my breath isn't heard" is not a watch problem — on the watch the thing to check is whether the pulse is being read. Details: Soluklan on Apple Watch.