Camera not working? Try this order
Browser camera problems look alike from the outside and have quite different causes. Going in this order saves you from reinstalling anything, because the most common cause is also the easiest to miss.
First: is another tab or app already holding the camera?
This is the most common cause by a distance. A camera can generally only be used by one application at a time, and the culprit is usually something left open rather than something in use — a video call in another tab, a meeting app minimised in the background, a camera preview window.
Close them properly, not just minimise, then reload this page. If your camera has a hardware light, it tells you the truth: if it is lit when you think nothing is using it, something is.
Second: did you dismiss or block the permission prompt?
Your browser asks for camera access once, at the moment video is about to begin. The request comes from the browser, not from us — and that matters for the fix, because once you have chosen Block, we cannot ask again. The prompt will not reappear no matter how many times you press start.
The fix has to happen in the browser's own site settings: find the permissions for this site, set camera back to Ask or Allow, then reload. In most desktop browsers the entry point is the small icon at the left-hand end of the address bar.
Third: iPhone and iPad have their own rules
On iOS the camera is available to Safari and to browsers built on it, and the permission state is held at the system level as well as the site level. If the prompt never appears at all, check Settings for the browser app itself — camera access can be switched off there, above and beyond anything the website asks for.
It is also worth making sure the page is served over a secure connection and that you are not inside an in-app browser opened from a messaging app, which is a common and confusing cause of a camera that simply never initialises.
Fourth: the operating system is the layer above all of this
On macOS and Windows, camera access is granted per application. If the browser itself has not been granted camera access by the operating system, no website can ask for it, and the in-page prompt may never appear.
Check the system privacy settings for Camera, confirm your browser is in the allowed list, then restart the browser completely — a reload is not enough after changing this.
If none of it works, you do not have to stop
A camera fault does not have to end the session. Voice mode does not touch the camera at all, and text mode requests no device permissions whatsoever.
Plenty of people use voice by preference rather than as a fallback — you keep almost all of the signal of a real conversation and none of the setup.