RefineIQ
Add to Chrome

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When something sticks.

Nearly every issue is one of the three below. If yours isn't, the guide covers normal setup end to end, and obliviox@zohomail.in reaches the people who build RefineIQ.

01

Microphone permission denied

Voice Draft needs a one-time microphone grant for the extension itself — not for each website. If recording won't start or the pill says microphone access is off:

  1. 1.Click the Voice pill's "Allow microphone" action — it opens RefineIQ's own setup tab, the one place Chrome can reliably show the permission prompt. Click Allow there.
  2. 2.If you previously clicked Block, Chrome won't re-ask. Open chrome://settings/content/microphone, find the RefineIQ entry under "Not allowed to use your microphone", and switch it to Allow — then retry from the setup tab.
  3. 3.On a Mac, Chrome itself also needs the system permission: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone → enable your browser, then restart it.
  4. 4.Check the right input device is selected at the top of chrome://settings/content/microphone — a disconnected headset that's still selected records silence.

Audio never leaves your machine: recording and transcription happen on-device, the permission is revocable any time in the same Chrome settings, and nothing can ever start listening on its own.

02

Model download stuck or failing

The one-time model download (~380 MB for text; the voice model adds ~73–195 MB depending on tier) streams from Hugging Face's CDN and is cached locally. If it stalls or errors:

  1. 1.Check your connection — and if you're behind a VPN, proxy, or strict firewall, try without it. The only hosts involved are Hugging Face's model CDN.
  2. 2.Make sure there's enough free disk space: roughly 1 GB free is a safe margin for the default tiers. Chrome silently evicts caches on a nearly-full disk.
  3. 3.Use the Retry action where the error appeared (popup or the in-page panel) — downloads resume cleanly and progress counts up honestly from where things stand.
  4. 4.Still heavy for your machine or connection? Pick the lighter model tier in Settings (~130 MB text, ~28 MB voice) — smaller, faster to fetch, still private.
  5. 5.If a download seems permanently wedged, remove and reinstall the extension. That clears the model cache entirely; settings take a minute to redo, and nothing else is stored.

After the download completes once, refining works fully offline — the network is only needed again if you switch to a model you haven't downloaded.

03

Slow refines & WebGPU requirements

On-device speed depends on whether your browser can use the GPU. RefineIQ uses WebGPU when available and falls back to WebAssembly (slower, but it works everywhere):

  1. 1.Use Chrome 113 or newer (or a current Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, or Arc) — RefineIQ requires 113+, and it's also the WebGPU baseline.
  2. 2.Check chrome://gpu and search for "WebGPU" — it should say Hardware accelerated. If it doesn't, enable "Use graphics acceleration when available" in chrome://settings/system and relaunch.
  3. 3.On machines without a usable GPU, refines still work via WebAssembly — expect a few extra seconds per refine. The lighter model tier in Settings narrows the gap considerably.
  4. 4.Very old or low-memory hardware (≤2 GB RAM) is happiest on the light tiers for both text and voice — that's exactly what they exist for.
  5. 5.If refines feel slower than they used to, check that the first refine after browser startup isn't the culprit: the model loads into memory once per session, then subsequent refines are fast.

Prefer a bigger model than your hardware can run? Bring-your-own-key cloud mode (Settings → Provider) sends prompts directly to your own OpenRouter or Hugging Face account — never through a RefineIQ server.

Still stuck? Email obliviox@zohomail.in with your browser and version, on-device or cloud mode, and what you expected versus what happened — RefineIQ keeps no logs, so that context is genuinely all we have to go on. Never include prompts or API keys.