How To Auto-mute Your Mic When Joining A Zoom Meeting

Zoom has been a software of immense help to us following the shutdown of schools and companies.

Unfortunately, not many people can rightly manipulate the software, as more often than not, background noises get in the way of meetings.

So here’s a simple thing you can do right now to make every meeting you join better: Set yourself to auto-mute your mic when you join a meeting.

Doing this will ensure every meeting you join will go by more smoothly. You and your coworkers will never have to hear the irritable background noise or side conversations filter through while the actual speaker is trying to talk because everyone will already be muted unless they need to speak.

You also would not have to worry that your coworkers will hear you use the toilet or sink in the middle of a meeting. Best of all, it’s one single checkbox away.

Here’s how you do it: In the Zoom desktop app, click the settings wheel in the upper right corner of the app to access your account settings. Click Audio in the sidebar on the left, and check “Mute my microphone when joining a meeting.”

If you know you can’t be trusted to unmute when you need to speak and then mute yourself again when you are done, consider also checking the “Press and hold SPACE key to temporarily unmute yourself,” which is kind of like push-to-talk. You can press the spacebar to speak up, and say what you need to say, and when you let go, you’ll be muted again.

If you are usually the host of said noisy meetings, on the web, go right to your account settings, and then toggle “Mute participants upon entry.” Then you can selectively unmute people if they need to talk or give people the ability to unmute themselves.