A control system is used to control equipment, the equipment being configured to receive user input control commands from one or more human interface devices. The control system receives captured user input control commands and then identifies control actions to be applied to the equipment in order to put into effect the user input control commands. The control actions are converted to human interface device, HID, input commands compatible with said one or more human interface devices, suitable for controlling the equipment. The HID input commands are then transmitted to the equipment to emulate user input applied to said one or more human interface devices. In this way the control system can be applied to different types of equipment, by converting the input control commands (e.g. spoken commands or gesture commands) into the suitable HID input commands (that would normally be manually input by the user) for the particular equipment.