Recently Google has made available Android 4.4 kitkat’s ‘Ok Google’ feature to Chrome on desktop with Google Voice Search Hotword extension. If you’ve installed that extension, you can notice microphone icon in system tray keeps appearing in system tray (unless you’re not visiting Google site) on hover by showing message ‘Google Chrome is using your microphone’ to get your attention but is turning to be distractive and annoying to concentrate on work.
What’s happening here is extension keeps listening for you to say ‘Ok Google’ phrase whenever you visit Google.com. So whenever you switch or changed to Google.com tab in Chrome it appears in notification area. It stops listening for ‘Ok Google’ after 5 minutes to reduce battery consumption on laptop.
Stop Google Voice Search microphone icon from appearing in system tray
If you don’t want to see that microphone icon again with that message in system tray do below mentioned things.
1. Visit Chrome://extensions page and click on ‘Options’ for installed Google Voice Search Hotword extension and remove tick mark for ‘Enable “Ok Google” hotword detection when on Google Search’.
2. Disable or remove the extension.
