How to Turn On or Off Hey Cortana Voice Activation in Windows 10  

meinprotaras said:

Curiosity got the better of me why my system is behaving different than yours!

I confirmed several more times that in my system Cortana starts listening when you say "Cortana" setting is NOT toggling the AgentActivationEnabled DWORD.

So I used Regshot (regshot download | SourceForge.net) to find out which keys are being changed when I toggle the Cortana starts listening when you say "Cortana" setting.

The keys that are being changed in my system are:
(1)
HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-3776698016-3744968400-3832367979-1002\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech_OneCore\Preferences
VoiceActivationOn DWORD (0 = OFF | 1 = ON)
(2)
HKU\S-1-5-21-3776698016-3744968400-3832367979-1002\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech_OneCore\Settings\VoiceActivation\SignalDetectionConfigurations\Micros oft.549981C3F5F10_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App\{169B82C7-1ECE-454F-B632-A45DD7302D73}\1033\{A5A7C794-3D59-41DF-915F-19ACDA526FC9}
Available DWORD (0 = ON | 1 = OFF)

First question:
Do you know - or can you make an educated guess - as to why in my case keys in the HKU hive are being changed versus the HKCU hive?

Second question:
My Windows is the Home edition with the latest updates installed (20H2, build 19042.630). I suspect you have the Pro or Enterprise edition? Do you think this explains the different behavior, or perhaps some other features/settings in your system?

Thank you for your time Shawn!

User settings are also referenced in HKU, but you normally set them in either HKCU or HKLM and they automatically get referenced at HKU. We usually don't apply directly to HKU since each user has a unique GUID that would be impossible for a universal .reg file to use.

After some testing, there does appear to be a different registry setting between the latest Insider (20262) and public (19042.662) builds.

I'm going to have to update the tutorial now for this.

@meinprotaras,

I have updated option 3 to now work for Windows 10 version 20H2.

meinprotaras said:

Great! Tested and working.
Thank you Shawn!

You're most welcome. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.