How To Turn Off Speech Recognition In Windows 10

With technology advancing, we are moving towards an era where computing will become more accessible and much easier. The speech recognition technology is part of this advancement and is making the lives of users easier, allowing them to interact with their devices with the help of audio commands.

Speech recognition on Windows 10 however, is a hit or miss. Many times, the commands are not interpreted correctly, or the results displayed are not relevant to the search phrase. Plus, the recent reports of compromised privacy has left a sour taste in the users’ mind. This can lead to many users wanting to turn off speech recognition in Windows 10.

Turn Off Speech Recognition In Windows 10!

Speech recognition eliminates the need to manually type commands in order to interact with your system. Upon correct training, speech recognition can be used in day to day activities and can help a lot of users in computing efficiently.

However, if you find the speech recognition to be not useful, you can turn off speech recognition in Windows 10. Here I will discuss the three potential ways you can do that.

Method 1: Disable Online Speech Recognition Feature

This is a new feature that lets you interact with Cortana and other cloud-based Microsoft services. If you don’t use Cortana or these cloud services for that matter, you can turn off voice recognition from the Settings itself. Simply follow these steps to do so:

1. Open the Settings You can use the keyboard shortcut Win + I.
2. Click on Privacy.
3. From the left pane, select Speech.
4. In the right pane, slide the toggle towards off under the Online speech recognition

This will turn off online speech recognition for your system. If you wish to turn off the inbuilt speech recognition software, follow this next method.

Method 2: Disable Speech Recognition

Speech recognition in Windows 10 can be used to dictate your commands instead of typing them manually. You can turn off the inbuilt speech recognition technology of Windows 10 as well. to do so, follow these steps:

1. Open the Settings app on your system.
2. Click on Ease of Access.
3. From the left pane, under Interaction, select Speech.
4. In the right pane, slide the toggle towards off under the Turn on Speech Recognition.

Here you will also find the keyboard shortcut Win + Ctrl + S to turn speech recognition On or Off.

Method 3: Use The Registry Editor

The registry editor houses many important configuration settings for the software and settings installed on your computer. You can make certain changes in Registry Editor to turn off the speech recognition in Windows 10.

1. Open a Run dialog box by pressing Win + R
2. Type regedit and press Enter to open the Registry editor.
   Click on Yes in User Account Control prompt.
3. In the address bar, type and press Enter to navigate to the following path:
   Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Speech_OneCore\Settings\OnlineSpeechPrivacy 
4. In the right pane, locate the DWORD entry titled HasAccepted.
5. Check the value for the said DWORD entry. If it is set to 1, it means you have allowed Speech recognition on your system.

6. Change the value to 0 to disable Online Speech Recognition.
7. Restart your PC for the changes to take effect.

Conclusion

So, there you have it. Now you know how to turn off speech recognition in Windows 10 using the methods given above. Comment below if you successfully turned it off on your system, and to discuss further the same.