Are you unhappy with Cortana? Do you distrust the amount of information Microsoft collects to “optimize” its voice recognition? If you answered yes to both questions, you might want to try Agnitio, a small program that lets you control your operating system with simple voice commands. Opening browsers, searching major engines, basic system resources, and streaming portals are just some of the available options.
Cortana is disabled on my main machine, first because I didn’t have good experiences with it (read: “it’s deaf”), and second because my microphone decided to challenge gravity (and lost). Something similar happens with Alexa on my Kindle Fire, though that’s a personal decision. I admit I’ve never been very interested in controlling a desktop computer with my voice. I feel I’m faster with the mouse-and-keyboard combo, and I don’t think that will change anytime soon. The potential of assistants is much greater on mobile devices, whether smartphones or tablets, but the big companies are convinced we want the same on our PCs. Another detail to consider is that they collect a lot of information, and that makes any user uncomfortable.
Control Windows with your voice
The Agnitio program promises the best of both worlds: control Windows using your voice without sending information outside. The program offers a list of commands divided into five sections: Browsers, system, websites, search engines, and extra. Agnitio doesn’t require a keyword or phrase; you can switch between a female or male voice, its interface has two themes (light and dark), and training mode helps improve performance. Agnitio has two statistics sending parameters, but both come disabled.
Agnitio is in beta, and with it we find certain limitations. The most important is that it only understands English commands. I imagine this will change in the future, but for now, think of this barrier as a good opportunity to practice. On the other hand, the program doesn’t allow creating specialized commands and only works with those shown in its interface. Agnitio requires .NET Framework, and VirusTotal returned a result of 1/61, which qualifies as a false positive.
(Editor’s note: The official site is down due to excessive traffic. We’ll leave a mirror for the download.)
