Cortana out of control?

brianwall · 12 Mar 2017

PC Build 15055
I have a multimonitor setup with two graphics cards. Whilst viewing BBC iPlayer or a VLC player video, Cortana pops up on another monitor and displays a message. Usually "Listening" or once "I didn't catch that". The screen is only up for a couple of seconds and interrupts the audio on whatever is playing on the other monitor.

I've run a full Defender scan and a Kaspersky deep scan. Both came up clean. There are no other strange behaviours and Cortana never pops up except in these specific circumstances. Incidentally I never use or setup Cortana.

dalchina · 12 Mar 2017

Try disabling the 'Hey Cortana' setting (shown as 'on' in the screenshot - set it to off).

I would expect Cortana to only respond if Hey Cortana is heard, but there may be sthg else going on.

If that's not enough see this Tutorial (well worth browsing/searching the extensive and growing Tutorial section)
Cortana - Turn On or Off in Windows 10

brianwall · 13 Mar 2017

Thanks - I'll try that. It seems Cortana is listening to my movies and responding when it thinks it hears "Hey Cortana". I first tried just shouting hey cortana whilst typing this and sure enough up she popped all pert and ears!! So my mic is always live? Disquieting isn't it?

dalchina · 13 Mar 2017

Hi, disquieting- good pun! Well, C is only responsive to that if you enable it. I happen to have it enabled but never found Cortana popping up unexpectedly.

It's kind of convenient occasionally for, say, Hey Cortana, file explorer - or whichever program you want.

e.g. Hey Cortana, start Finereader
- launches Abby FineReader.

But I'm a traditional desktop style oriented person and avoid the universal apps and Cortana- especially Cortana search features.

As for listening to you- well, the same good be said if you use Windows Speech Recognition, for example.
Try it- type Speech Recognition in the search box (probably only 'speech' is enough) and you can, try, say
Open file explorer

Now if that's listening to you, is that a threat? I guess it's your personal view of conspiracy theories. But then some say the CIA can have Samsung TVs listening to you....