Plain-English guides for people meeting AI for the first time, written for readers who want the switch, the step or the setting – not the theory. Every price and menu path is dated, and we say plainly when the free option is the right answer.
Open Settings, choose Copilot, and switch Turn on Copilot off – it hides Copilot on every Outlook signed in to that account. Typing suggestions, suggested replies and (in classic Outlook) Connected experiences are three separate switches. On September 17, 2026 we read nine of the top ten pages for this question: only 2 cover three of the four, and 0 say what the AI costs you.
Use AI as an interviewer and an editor, never as the author. Turn on Temporary Chat, talk out loud for five minutes instead of filling in a form, then ask it to put ten questions back to you and write the answers yourself. About 45 minutes. On September 16, 2026 we fetched all ten pages ranking for this question – none of them mentions the two free settings that keep a dead person’s details out of AI training data.
Start with Settings > Galaxy AI > Process data only on device – Samsung calls it the master switch. It is not the whole job. A Galaxy runs AI from two companies in separate menus, and on September 15, 2026 we counted 19 settings screens named in the official Samsung and Google help pages. Plus the sentence Samsung prints and none of the nine top-ranked guides repeat: some AI features cannot be disabled.
In 2026 you usually cannot tell an AI-written email from a human one, and that is the wrong question anyway. Four style tells still work, three are dead, and one 60-second check proves who actually sent the message.
GPT-6 Astra launched September 3, 2026. It is not on the free tier, and on Plus it is only inside Work and Codex. Independent testing scored it 53 against 47 for its predecessor, tied with Claude at lower cost. Checked September 13, 2026.
Your iPhone rewrites your notifications, your email previews and your texts before you read them – and there is no single off switch. Apple put them in four separate menus. On September 13, 2026 we fetched the pages ranking for this question and none of them named all three summary settings. Here is every path, copied from Apple’s own guide, plus the documented habit of iOS updates switching the feature back on – with iOS 27 landing September 14.
Microsoft quietly added a second free year to the Windows 10 Extended Security Updates program on June 25, 2026: consumer coverage now runs through October 12, 2027, and two of the three enrollment options cost nothing. On September 12, 2026 we checked the ten pages ranking for this question and none of them printed the new date. Here is how to enroll in five minutes, the second deadline nobody mentions, and how to spot the scam that rides along with it.
Google’s own help page says AI Overviews cannot be turned off. It also names the way out in the next sentence: the Web filter. On September 11, 2026 we ran 16 everyday questions twice. An AI answer appeared on 15 of 16 normal pages and 0 of 16 filtered ones, and the first real link moved from 636 pixels down the page to 206. Here is how to switch it, how to make it permanent on a computer in five minutes, and why it is harder on a phone.
Almost certainly nothing to your money. In nine years no agency has documented a single victim, and federal rules require a recorded phone authorization to contain seven things a one-word yes has none of. Here is what answering really does, and what actually took $7.748 billion from Americans over 60 last year.
Use it to plan the search, read the handwriting and organize your notes — never to find a record or produce a citation. It cannot open FamilySearch’s 16.93 billion indexed names, and of the nine guides ranking for this question, only three warn that it invents sources.