Xbox gamebar party chat not working as it should.

There are a few tricky areas that can cause your audio device to switch off the active microphone. I'll name a couple of places to sanity check your audio as I go through this loop all of the time.

Game bar

1 Open up your game bar and click your Settings gear icon.

2 Choose Party Chat on the left tab

3 Check the drop down boxes for both AUDIO INPUT / OUTPUT. The input must be your system microphone. For example it might say:
Microphone Realtek Audio. If not, switch to the proper device in the drop down list.

4 (Optional) The Widget Menu has a Audio tab that you can pin / enable to the dash. Once open click the Voice tab and it will also have the Microphone drop box. Make sure this is the right device.

Xbox app

1 At the top click your GamerTag Icon and then click Settings

2 Click Audio tab on the left side.

3 Check the Input / Output Device drop down boxes and make sure they match the devices you listed in Game bar.

Windows Settings

Sometimes you plug in a device or a controller in a different usb port and it adds unwanted audio devices that hijack your Microphone making you repeat all the steps above. Well you can disable these from resetting your defaults by disabling them.

1 Right click your volume speaker icon next to clock on bottom right task bar.

2 Select Sounds.

3 Select Recording tab on the top tab.

4 Find your Microphone device, right click to set as Default Device.

5 (Optional) Click the Properties button of selected Microphone device, then click Levels tab, raise up volume / boost while watching the Party Chat icon blink sensitivity. You can create a party of one in Game bar to test this. If the circle is all white,
your boost is too high, if your circle doesn't blink try raising levels. Hit Win + G to get game bar to start the party.

6 (Optional) Find every device that has given your grief in the list and right click select Disable device.

Last but not least.

1 Right click your volume speaker icon next to clock on bottom right task bar.

2 Select Open Sound Settings

3 Scroll down to Input section and change drop box to match the same Microphone device used in the above.

4 You can also test your mic here and trouble shoot it if all else fails. Windows 10 Build 2004 totally broke Realtek audio drivers. You may have to totally uninstall the old ones inside Device manager and then download an older driver (basically the one
you just had before windows update ruined your machine). The next windows update will undo all your handy work. So you must go back to device manager and install with the from disk option and select Legacy Install to keep windows update from reverting it back
to new broken ones. This is the worst case scenario that happened to me.

Same issue here. I'd love to support this product and move over to game bar but until this gets fixed I'm going to have to keep using the console companion.

use gamebar for party chat instead then you can pop into gamebar setting and set the default mic and output in there better.

use any mic and use gamebar for party chat.

just use gamebar for parties and chat, dont have to open any apps then.