We rely more and more on artificial intelligence. AI is gradually entering various areas of our lives, not only in terms of the implementation of the workflow, but also in everyday household chores.
A huge number of users of electronic gadgets/devices are already actively using various voice assistants, which help to get rid of performing some routine tasks.
But not many users of the Windows operating system know about the development of Microsoft, who have invested a lot of money and effort in their own assistant with artificial intelligence skills called (or under the name) – Cortana. This assistant is preinstalled on all devices running Windows 10 and is always available for use, despite the lack of popularity of the user segment.
And for more than one month, there is information that Microsoft is gradually abandoning the further open development of Cortana, precisely because of the lack of proper attention, which ultimately can lead to the final "loss" of this assistant from the operating system.
But some users have a question about disabling Cortana right now, and that's what we'll talk about in this article.
What can help?
Before you disable any software, you should familiarize yourself with the functionality that it offers.
It is worth noting that even considering the small popularity of Cortana, this voice assistant offers quite interesting features that many users may still be useful, for example:
- Quick search by voice request;
- Set reminders, including setting an alarm;
- Customize your schedule with calendar;
- Weather forecast tracking;
- Currency exchange rate checking and conversion;
- Search for media files;
- Run the software;
- Unusual communication with artificial intelligence.
This list is not exhaustive, as the capabilities of the voice assistant are much more extensive.
To date, the voice assistant can work with the following language packs:
- English;
- Japanese;
- Portuguese;
- German;
- Italian;
- Spanish;
- French;
- Chinese.
Therefore, for those users for whom such localization is not suitable, the presence of Cortana voice assistant in the operating system is simply unnecessary.
How to disable Cortana?
It should be understood that the developers themselves are not interested in their projects being disabled by users, so they leave small loopholes that allow certain processes to continue to work, even if regular measures have been taken to disable.
Given the fact that Cortana has a fairly solid functional set, and therefore certain rights/privileges/powers, to completely disable the voice assistant, you will need to edit the system components.
The following procedure can be divided into three stages:
P/S Create a restore point to roll back the system configuration in case of possible problems.
- The change of basic parameters:
- Click "Start" - "Settings" - "Privacy";
- Select "Speech" and set the switch to "off".
- Making an entry in the register:
- Use the keyboard shortcut "WIN+R" and run the command "regedit";
- Open the section
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search»
- If there is no destination folder, create it manually by right-clicking on the "Windows" folder and selecting "New" - "Key".
- In this section, you will need to create a "DWORD" parameter named "AllowCortana" with a value of "0";
- Close the registry editor and restart the computer.
If there is no result, try making changes in the local group policy editor to do this:
- Click "WIN+R2 and run "gpedit.msc";
- Next, open "computer Configuration" - "Administrative templates" - "Windows Components";
- In the list, open the folder "Search" and find the entry "AllowCortana";
- Open the option and set the mode to "Off".
In most cases, you can stop there, but as an additional safety net, you can delete the file "SearchUI.exe", which is the executable file of "Search and Cortana application".
This will be the third phase of Cortana's shutdown announced above.
- Open Explorer and follow the following path "C:\Windows\SystemApps»;
- In the folder list, locate the Microsoft directory.Windows.Cortana_cw5n1h2txyewy" and rename it in any convenient way;
- Open "Task Manager" and find the process "SearchUI.exe";
- Click on it and select "Complete process tree".
It remains to restart the computer.
Conclusion
The last thing worth noting is the relevance of this material for laptop users, since in practice it has been repeatedly noticed that the processes associated with the search functionality consume a solid amount of battery resources.