Gigabyte's new gaming laptops come with voice control for performance, fan, and privacy settings, so you can shout at them if they won't pipe down

Are you ready for some more AI? Is that a heck yeah I hear? Oh… Well, here's some more anyway. This time courtesy of Gigabyte's new gaming laptops which are going to ship with "press and speak" functionality for voice control.

The company explains that the just-announced Gaming A18 and Gaming A16 Pro comes with "GiMate, Gigabyte's proprietary AI agent, [which] enables intuitive 'Press and Speak' control for performance tuning, fan adjustment, privacy functions, and more."

The obvious question is: Why? The only answer I have is 'beats me.' I've not actually tried it, of course, so it could be one of those things that sounds completely and utterly pointless on paper but is somehow miraculously useful in practice.

Maybe using a button to speak to your computer to perform some limited functions will be more convenient than navigating some settings or having a taskbar-located AI assistant to speak to.

The one thing that might make this worthwhile is something my colleague Andy pointed out, which is that there could be something very comical about shouting above the noise of your laptop to tell it to TURN THE FANS DOWN. There might not be too much of an issue with that if the Gigabyte Gaming A16 is anything to go by, though, because that laptop had its TGP set quite low.

The GiMate software that the voice control will interface with is actually pretty decent. At least, Zak thought so in his review of the A16: "Generally, it's very smooth and operates well with the help of some Microsoft assistance."

Apart from these AI gubbins, the laptops are reasonably-specced, but nothing out of the ordinary. The Gigabyte Gaming A16 Pro has up to an RTX 5080 mobile and a previous-gen Intel Core 7 240H, and the Gaming A18 up to an RTX 5060 and an AMD Ryzen 7 260. Both have 165 Hz displays and up to 4 TB of storage, although the A16 pro has a faster (Gen4x4) second M.2 slot.

It's interesting that the 18-inch model maxes out so low on the GPU front, given larger laptops tend to offer more horsepower. It also offers up to 64 GB of memory compared to the 16-inch model's 32 GB, and its CPU is more powerful, which makes me think it might be aimed at more of a productivity market alongside gaming, despite its nominal 'Gaming' moniker.

All of that's irrelevant anyway, right? What matters is that incredibly useful button-activated voice control. I'll take three.