Recently purchased Shokz Bone Conduction Open-Ear Sport Headphones. Bluetooth paired to Windows 11 Pro 22H2 on Dell Vostro 3520 laptop. I could not succeed in choosing the headphones as an audio device. When the headphones are connected via Bluetooth, they do NOT appear as a connected or disconnected sound device even though the Bluetooth settings does show them as connected. When they are NOT connected, they do appear as a disconnected sound device as seen in the attached screenshot. The same headphones appear twice, once as headphones and once as headset since the device also has a built-in microphone. Although there are dozens of websites offering advice, none of them were helpful because they assumed that the playback device shows up in the sound panel when connected. Device manager shows no errors with any of the relevant devices. Device drivers were all the latest versions. The only method I could find to solve the problem was to remove Handsfree Telephony as one of its services. See second screenshot. This workaround has 2 drawbacks.
- Removing the service does not survive a reboot and requires repeating the properties change.
- I cannot use the Shokz device as a headset for a Zoom call.
A Microsoft Surface computer running Windows 10 22H2 does NOT have this Bluetooth audio challenge.
