Default Compressor Settings

IMO Audacity’s native compressor is unsuitable for speech because the release-time cannot be set shorter than 1 second, ( a voice compressor must be able to act on individual syllables, which are ~0.1sec in duration ).

There are many free compressor/limiter plugins designed for speech

The Audacity specific plugin LevelSpeech2.ny reacts quicker,
(but you can’t adjust it in real-time: as audio is playing).

LUveler is a free “podcast” compressor/limiter plugin which works in real-time in Audacity on Windows …