How to disable S Voice on the Galaxy S5

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Published 3 May 2014

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There is a high probability that you are not using Samsung’s Siri alternative — S Voice — on your brand new Galaxy S5. The feature in itself is of very little use, especially when Google’s Voice Actions provides a far better experience. However, even if you don’t use S Voice, it makes the home button on your Galaxy S5 (or S4, Note 3 and Note 3) slightly unresponsive.

This is because the default shortcut to enable S Voice is to quickly double tap the home button. So, every time you press the home button once, it waits to check if the user is going to press the button a second time or not. This leads to a slight delay in all actions from the home button to take place  — including the device waking up from sleep when you use the home button.

While this delay has been very much reduced on the Galaxy S5 compared to the S4, it is still very much noticeable coming from any other Android device. Thankfully, you can easily disable this shortcut key and S Voice altogether to make the home button slightly more responsive. Read below to find out how.

Step 1: Activate S Voice on your Galaxy S5 by quickly pressing the home button twice. Then, Tap the menu overflow button on the top-right followed by the Settings option.

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Step 2: Scroll down to the Wake-Up category and disable the option to activate S-Voice via the home key. You can also switch off the voice wake-up functionality from here. This should help in slightly increasing the battery life as well.

The above steps should help in greatly increasing the home button responsiveness on your Galaxy S5 as well as the Galaxy S4. Keep in mind that there is now no way to quickly activate S Voice other than going into your app drawer and launching it.