So what’s new in the world of processors? What about voice activation. Yup, Intel’s newest Skylake processors come with a creepy new feature, they listen to you. Just say (loudly I guess) “Hey Cortana” or “Wake up Cortana” at a Windows 10 machine with one of these new chips, and your voice will be picked up by a digital signal processor secreted inside the chip that will rouse your PC from its low power state. Once it wakes up, Cortana takes over and you can use all the standard voice commands, including telling the digital to play music or videos.
Intel announced this new feature at their Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco yesterday. This feature follows similar ones on Microsoft’s Xbox One and Motorola’s Moto X smartphone. Those features waer of as a novelty quite soon, but we see the waking your PC from the kitchen catching on quite nicely. Intel didn’t mention how much power the always-listening mode will drain or how much it will affect the standby power, nor whether users would need any extra hardware in order to boss their computer around with words. Although Intel said voice activation was technically possible with last year’s Core M chips, it’s only now with Windows 10 and its Cortana integration that PCs can take advantage of the feature.
Source: TheVerge
Follow Jaco on Twitter: @Jaco_vdWalt
