Root and non-root ways of disabling a stock voice assistant
My Galaxy S II came with a voice assistant mapped to double clicking the home button. It isn’t exactly the most powerful thing out there, and pales in comparison to that of the S III, or my own DIY voice assistant. Aside from being useless, the button mapping made it outright annoying, as it would sometimes trigger when I either accidentally double clicked home, or when OS lag made it think I did. Here are two simple ways of disabling such a feature.
Root method: freeze the app
If you’re rooted, getting rid of a stock voice assistant is easy. You need Titanium Backup, and then you simply go into the Backup/Restore list, find the voice app (on the S II it’s called Voice Command), click it, and select freeze. That’s it. This disables the app completely, making it impossible to use it at all, and in the process, making it impossible to launch accidentally.
Download: Titanium Backup
Non root method: Tasker “no you won’t” profile
A non-root method of doing this involves my favorite app, Tasker. It’s not as simple or as effective as the Titanium Backup method, but when was a non-root method ever as effective as a root-only method?
Anyways, you need to setup a Tasker profile with the voice app as the context, and a simple Go Home action as the task. This will make Tasker send a home button command when the voice app launches, essentially making it impossible to do anything but very briefly launch the app, because it will go back to the home screen immediately. For accidental button presses, you’ll see the app flash briefly before it goes back to the home screen, which saves you the trouble of doing it yourself, and will stop the voice message from going off. It’s more than just slightly annoying to have your phone start talking to you when you’re at the store and accidentally double click home while walking, and this method at least makes that a non-issue without your phone having root.
Download: Google Play
