We are experiencing severe echo on outbound calls since upgrading to Chrome 121.
Agents hear their own voice echoed back with a 200ms delay. This only happens with USB headsets (Jabra, Poly). Bluetooth headsets work fine. The issue started exactly when Chrome auto-updated to 121.
Chrome 121 changed the default audio processing pipeline. The new AudioContext implementation has a different echo cancellation algorithm.
Open chrome://flags and set #chrome-wide-echo-cancellation to ‘Disabled’. This reverts to the previous echo cancellation engine. Test to confirm the echo resolves.
We pushed the Chrome flag via Group Policy to all agent workstations.
{"managed_bookmarks": [],
"AudioProcessingEchoCancellation": false}
Deploy via ADMX template. This ensures the flag persists across Chrome updates until Google fixes the regression.
From a speech analytics standpoint, the echo corrupts the agent-side audio channel.
The echo causes the speech-to-text engine to double-transcribe the customer’s speech (once from the customer channel, once from the echo on the agent channel). This inflates keyword counts and distorts sentiment scoring.
We tested across 8 USB headset models on Chrome 121.
| Headset | Echo Present | Chrome Flag Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Jabra Evolve2 75 | Yes | Yes |
| Jabra Evolve2 40 | Yes | Yes |
| Poly Voyager 5200 | No | N/A |
| Poly Blackwire 5220 | Yes | Yes |
| Sennheiser SC 60 | Yes | Partial |
| Logitech Zone 900 | No | N/A |
Headsets with onboard DSP echo cancellation (Poly 5200, Logitech 900) are unaffected.