Voice assistants have come a long way and are actually a useful feature, more so in making smartphones accessible for people with disability.
Google Assistant is considered to be one of the cornerstones of modern technology, allowing you to do everything from task automation, controlling your IoT devices and even cracking jokes.
However, some people are not fans of this and would like to have this feature turned off. If you are one of the people who doesn’t like the voice assistant on your device, then you can turn it off.
Here is how to turn off Google assistant on your android smartphone (except Samsung, which have Bixby as the default voice assistant).
- Go to the Google App.
- Once open, tap of the profile picture on the top right corner of the app screen.
- You will get a drop down menu. Select Settings, then Google Assistant.
- Now you will get two sections: Popular Settings and All Settings. You can then select how you want to interact with the assistant.
- Under Popular Settings, you then select Hey Google & Voice Match.
- Then toggle the Hey Google slider to off. This disables the voice assistant.
Samsung Bixby
When using Samsung and it is defaulted to Bixby, here is how to turn it off:
- Open the Bixby app, which Samsung installs on all their devices with this feature.
- Then tap the Settings icon at the bottom right.
- Then click on Voice wake-up
- Slide the toggle to off in the next page.
This turns off Bixby completely. However, you can also disable only some features on Bixby if you don’t want to turn the whole feature off.
And there you have it! If you find voice assistants more annoying than helpful, the above steps will help you turn them off for a smoother smartphone experience.
