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By now, you likely know that some Windows 10 laptops ship with dedicated Cortana button to help users quickly access the digital personal assistant from Microsoft. As of now, only Toshiba laptops are featuring dedicated Cortana button, but others will also likely include the dedicated button in near future once Cortana becomes available in more countries.
If you have upgraded your laptop from Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 and Cortana is supported in your region/country, then you might be interested to know the ways out there to quickly access Cortana.
Accessing Cortana is pretty straight-forward job, even on PCs without the dedicated button. It's just a click-away and more importantly, popular touchpad manufacturers support launching Cortana by three finger tap or click. That is, on some laptops, it's possible to launch Cortana by making three finger click or tap on touchpad.
It looks like Synaptics already supports launching Cortana with three finger tap. On my ThinkPad T450s, I can launch Cortana with three finger tap. If you're also using a ThinkPad or any other laptop with Synaptics touchpad, follow the given below instructions to turn on or off three finger tap or click to launch Cortana on Windows 10.
Enable or disable three finger tap or click to launch Cortana
Step 1: Make sure that you've installed latest version of the touchpad driver. If you haven't disabled automatic driver updates on Windows 10, then you likely have the latest version of the driver. And if you have turned off the feature, please download and install the latest version of the touchpad driver from Synaptics.
Step 2: Type Control Panel in the Start menu or taskbar search box and then press Enter to open the classic Control Panel.
Step 3: Change the View by to Small icons, and then click Mouse to open Mouse Properties.
Step 4: Switch to the ThinkPad tab if you're using a ThinkPad and then click Settings.
And if you're using any other laptop, there must be a way to open touchpad settings. The Settings button is located under the last tab on most notebooks. Check if the title of the last tab is Device Settings or Synaptics, and if there is one, select Synaptics TouchPad under Devices, and then click Settings button.
Step 5: Once Synaptics Control Panel is opened, switch to Click tab by clicking on the same.
Step 6: Here, check options titled Three-finger tap and Three Finger Click, and then select Cortana from the drop-down box next to them. Finally, click OK.
As you can see in the above picture, four finger tap or click can be used to launch Action Center on Windows 10.
