Disable Cortana Push to Talk on Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows

Last Updated on January 27, 2022 by GrahamWalsh

With the recent update of Microsoft Teams Room 4.10.10.0, Cortana was made available to everyone with the ability to Push to Talk and then ask Cortana to perform some commands for you. However, this moved the Present button to under the … More menu. This has left some people confused. To turn off Cortana completely for the room systems, you need to create a Microsoft Teams Policy. This is straight forward for a Teams Administrator to do.

PowerShell Code to run

Install-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams
Connect-MicrosoftTeams
Get-CsTeamsCortanaPolicy
New-CsTeamsCortanaPolicy -Identity MeetingRooms -CortanaVoiceInvocationMode Disabled
Grant-CsTeamsCortanaPolicy -Identity flexroom01@contoso.com -PolicyName MeetingRooms
Get-CsOnlineUser flexroom01@contoso.com | fl teamscortanapolicy

From the above, we want to install the MicrosoftTeams module and then connect to it. We can then look at the current policy using get-csteamscortanapolicy and decide what to create.

I then create a new policy and call it MeetingRoom and select to have Cortana disabled. I then grant the room/URI flexroom01@contoso.com to the MeetingRooms policy.

Finally check the user account with get-csonlineuser and filter on the teamscortanapolicy. Once I know the account has the policy, I the reboot the Microsoft Teams Room from console, Teams Admin Center or Crestron XIO Cloud etc.

Here’s a video overview

Just a note that you might come across an error if you are trying to apply this policy to accounts that are not licensed. Thanks to Damian Lewis who discovered this when getting errors applying this to an unlicensed account/resource.

Also published on Medium.