MacBook Pro siri audio problem

A week ago my Siri on my MacBook Pro was working fine, now for some reason it says Siri audio problem whenever i try to use it. Normally as soon as I press the Siri icon, it would pop up in the corner and have that wavy line as it hears my voice. Now it just shows the microphone icon. After a few seconds it say something along the lines of "just a second..." followed my a heading of "SIRI Audio Problem, Siri was unable to hear you. Please check that your microphone is connected and selected in SIRI Mic input"


I've done everything it asked to no success.


Any help would be good?

MacBook Pro with Retina display, macOS Sierra (10.12.2)

Posted on Jan 4, 2017 12:00 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Nov 27, 2017 5:14 AM

Terminal is an app on your computer - you can find it in your Applications -> Utilities folder, or you can use Spotlight search to find it. Access Spotlight by clicking the magnifying glass in the upper right corner of your desktop, then type "Terminal". Terminal.app should be the first returned result, hit the return key to run it.


In the black Terminal box that pops up, paste the below sentence exactly, including all quotation marks etc.


sudo kill -9 `ps ax|grep 'coreaudio[a-z]' | awk '{print $1}'


and then hit the return key. A password prompt will appear that just says "Password:" Type the password that you use to log in to your Mac - note that you will not see any asterisks or letters appear as you type. Once you are done typing the password, hit return - it will appear as though nothing has happened, but Siri should be working again.


As far as what you're actually doing here - CoreAudio is a background process that runs on your Mac that manages how apps play and record sound. It's very important, so macOS monitors this process to always make sure it is running. I'm not sure why, but the Siri audio problem has to do with some sort of issue between Siri and CoreAudio. The command that you run in Terminal kills the CoreAudio process - but because it is an important process, macOS immediately starts it again. This restarting process seems to fix the issue with Siri audio.


Hope this helps.

15 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Nov 27, 2017 5:14 AM in response to deej10

Terminal is an app on your computer - you can find it in your Applications -> Utilities folder, or you can use Spotlight search to find it. Access Spotlight by clicking the magnifying glass in the upper right corner of your desktop, then type "Terminal". Terminal.app should be the first returned result, hit the return key to run it.


In the black Terminal box that pops up, paste the below sentence exactly, including all quotation marks etc.


sudo kill -9 `ps ax|grep 'coreaudio[a-z]' | awk '{print $1}'


and then hit the return key. A password prompt will appear that just says "Password:" Type the password that you use to log in to your Mac - note that you will not see any asterisks or letters appear as you type. Once you are done typing the password, hit return - it will appear as though nothing has happened, but Siri should be working again.


As far as what you're actually doing here - CoreAudio is a background process that runs on your Mac that manages how apps play and record sound. It's very important, so macOS monitors this process to always make sure it is running. I'm not sure why, but the Siri audio problem has to do with some sort of issue between Siri and CoreAudio. The command that you run in Terminal kills the CoreAudio process - but because it is an important process, macOS immediately starts it again. This restarting process seems to fix the issue with Siri audio.


Hope this helps.

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MacBook Pro siri audio problem

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