​How To...Control Your Windows PC With Your Voice

Why use a keyboard and mouse when you could simply tell your PC what you want it to do?

- Wayne Williams

Why use a keyboard and mouse when you could simply tell your PC what you want it to do? Wayne Williams shows you how

It’s been possible to control your PC using voice-recognition software for many years now, yet opening a program or shutting down your computer simply by speaking a few simple commands – rather than using a keyboard and mouse – still seems a bit sci-fi. In fact, the only difficulty, once it’s all set up, is getting into the habit of telling your PC what you want to do, rather than using your hands to press keys or click buttons. That said, if you’re already using a voice assistant on your phone, such as Siri or Google Now, or you own a device like the Amazon Echo, you’ll already be used to controlling hardware with spoken commands.

Talk to Cortana

If you’re running Windows 10, then you already have tools for controlling your PC with your voice. Cortana, which began life on Windows phones, debuted in the first build of Windows 10 and has become increasingly more powerful in each major update of the operating system. You can ask her to perform various tasks, such as opening apps, searching the web, performing calculations, identifying songs as they play and composing and sending emails – all using just your voice.

The Creators Update introduced additional features to Cortana including the ability to lock your PC, and raise and lower the volume. The digital assistant is also supposed to be able to turn off, restart or send your PC to sleep, although these options don’t currently work on our updated PCs. Presumably they’ll be added in a future update. If you ask Cortana to do one of the unsupported tasks (“Cortana, shut down my PC”) she will provide information on how to do it manually.