When it goes wrong
The things that actually happen, and what fixes each one.
Almost everything that goes wrong here is a permission macOS took back without saying so, or a detector tuned for a quieter room than the one you are in.
It hears me, and nothing gets typed
Accessibility permission has been revoked, which macOS does quietly after some updates and whenever the app is replaced.
Open Setup from the menu bar. It names the missing permission and takes you to the right pane. Whatever you just said is left on the clipboard, so one paste recovers it.
The microphone was never asked for
Almost always a damaged copy rather than a settings problem.
Move the app to the bin, download it again, and open the fresh one. The prompt appears once per copy, so a copy that was refused cannot ask a second time.
It transcribes the room
The voice detector is set for a quiet desk.
Raise EARSHOT_VAD_THRESHOLD above 0.5, and EARSHOT_WAKE_THRESHOLD above 0.7 if you use hands-free. Both trade a little responsiveness for a lot of quiet.
It answers before I have finished talking
Your turn ends after a fixed run of silence, and 700 ms suits somebody who thinks before they speak.
Raise EARSHOT_VAD_SILENCE until the pauses in the middle of your sentences stop counting as the end of them.
An agent has never mentioned Earshot
It has not been restarted since the MCP server was registered.
Quit it properly and open it again. Every one of them reads its config at startup, and this is the step people miss.
I uninstalled it and an agent complains about a failed server on every launch
The agent still has an entry for the MCP server at a path that no longer exists. An app in the Trash cannot edit anybody's config.
Reinstall, open Setup from the menu bar, press Remove beside each agent or Remove from all, then uninstall. Or delete the earshot entry from the agent's config file by hand.
Still stuck
Setup is the first place to look: it checks the permissions, the models and every agent it knows about, and says which one is wrong rather than that something is.