Cortana is a virtual assistant provided by Microsoft Windows 10 operating system. It provides speech recognition where we can ask questions or give commands to the windows like When does summer begin or What gate is Delta flight 35 arriving at? etc. Microsoft does not want to disable Cortana by us and makes is harder. But we can disable Cortana for Windows 10 in different ways where we will examine these ways in this tutorial.
Hide Cortana Icon From Menu Bar
Cortana can be accessed from the menu bar with a circle icon which is depicted in the previous screenshot. We can hide the Cortana icon from the menu bar with the following steps. Right click to the menu bar -> Cortana->Hidden. As we can the default option is Show Cortana Icon. We will click to the Hidden like below.
Disable Cortana From Registry
Cortana can be disabled cruelly from the registry. We will open the registry editor from the Start Menu like below. We will rite down Registry Editor or regedit.
We will see the following screen which is named Registry Editor to manage windows registry configuration.
Navigate to the following registry key.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search
If the Windows Search does not exist create a Windows Search folder by right click
The newly created Windows Search will look like below.
We will create a new value named AllowCortana which type is DWORD(32 Bit) inside Windows Search folder. Then we will set the AllowCortana value to the 0 which means disable Cortana.
We can see the create value below which type is DWORD(32 Bit) and value is set to 0.
Disable Cortana From Group Policy
If you are using the Windows 10 Professional or Enterprise we can also use Group Policy Editor in order to disable the Cortana. Group Policies are used to manage Windows configuration for multiple computers and user groups. Local group policy is used to set Local configuration of the current system. We will open Local Group Policy Editor from the Start menu or Run like below by using gpedit.msc command.
We will see a window like below. We need to navigate to the Allow Cortana setting with these steps. Computer Configuration->Administrative Templates->Windows Components->Search. Then we will double click to the Allow Cortana configuration from the right pane like below.
We will see the following Allow Cortana configuration. We have 3 options where Not Configured, Enabled and Disabled. We will select the Disabled and click to the Apply.
Disable Cortana From Windows Settings
Windows 10 provides the Windows Settings configuration panel which can be also used to disable Cortana. We will open Windows Settings with the Win+I keyboard shortcut.
We will see the following screen where some basic Cortana configuration can be done. We can disable Cortana Hey Cortana respond interaction like below. By changing Off we will disable Cortana respond.
Remove Cortana Data
During the usage of the Cortana, some speech and search data will be stored locally. This historical activity data can be removed from the `Cortana Permission&History configuration like below.
