NPointer: Control your computer using Gestures and Voice Commands

Controlling your Windows computer using Gestures and Voice Commands has been a talk of the town for a while now. Gesture and voice recognition technology can help revolutionize the way we interact with our computer, not to mention the incredible help it would be for the differently abled people. Today we are going to talk about NPointer, an application for gesture and voice control software. Your hand or head movements are recorded by a webcam and translated into pointer movements using which you can control your computer.

Gesture and Voice Control software

NPointer helps control your computer using your hand movements as the input commands. Using a conventional webcam, directed towards the table where you can place your hand and move it around, you can control the pointer movements on the computer screen.

You can start the application by launching its executable file. It should bring up the app interface from where you can customize the app settings. You can adjust several parameters like pointer motion speed and acceleration to calibrate the pointer movement on computer’s screen. Apart from this, you can also fine-tune the menu timeout and the maximal motion speed which controls the pointer when you remove the hand from camera view field.

NPointer options

NPointer comes packed with various modes to control the pointer. You can configure the app settings to switch between the different control options.

• Camera control – Use the built-in or installed webcam to control the pointer
  • Hand – Use your hand to control the pointer. Convenient in case you have an installed webcam.
  • Head/frontal control – Use your head/frontal face to control the pointer. Convenient when using a laptop built-in camera.
• Voice control – Enables pointer menu selection using voice commands.

Action Menu Breakdown

When you keep you head/hand still for a while (time defined by menu timeout), an action menu pops up which looks like below, offering an array of functions that mimics a conventional mouse usage.

As is quite evident from the image above, once the action menu appears, you can move your hand/head to replicate the movement on the computer screen and place the action selection pointer on the desired function. The selected function will be triggered once your action selection pointer is moved to that function and stays still for a moment.

For scrolling, you need to select the scroll wheel action which activates the scrolling mode and bring up the below action menu in view.

Once scroll mode is selected, you can move your hand/head to scroll down the pages on the computer screen. If you want to turn off the scroll mode, just place the action selection pointer on Scroll off and let it stay there for a moment.

Voice Control

If you have selected Voice control as the default method to control the pointer, you’d need to adjust the voice settings and record the voice commands for several pointer functions.

To do so, click Voice settings button on the lower right corner. This should bring up the voice control settings menu where you can record a voice command for functions like right click, left click etc. The commands are configurable so you can delete them and record again.

Wrapping things up

NPointer is a light-weight app which can prove to be quite useful for the disabled people. Once you get a hang of the pointer movement and its functions, it becomes a fun to operate it. For better precision, the webcam quality should be good enough with higher framerate. Also, proper lighting conditions are equally important. If you’re using your hand for the gestures, you need to keep the hand on a stable table surface and point the webcam right on top of it.

How do I use voice commands to control my computer?

Although there is no in-built option to control your computer using voice commands, you can do that with the help of third-party software. It is called NPointer, which is free, easy to use, and available for Windows 11/10 PCs. You can set things up as per your requirements and give your computer some predefined commands to perform different things.

Does the Control Panel have an option to control your computer by voice?

Although it comes with Speech Recognition, it doesn’t work as you might want it to be. Therefore, Windows 11’s Control Panel might disappoint you in this case. However, you can check out this tool called NPointer, which is free software that allows users to control their computers with voice commands and gestures.

You can download the executable file from the official website. Let us know if you find it useful or if face any issues while using it.