Skylake Has a Voice DSP and Listens To Your Commands

itwbennett writes: Intel's new Skylake processor (like the Core M processor released last year) comes with a built-in digital signal processor (DSP) that will allow you to turn on and control your PC with your voice. Although the feature is not new, what is new is the availability of a voice controlled app to use it: Enter Windows 10 and Cortana. If this sounds familiar, it should, writes Andy Patrizio: 'A few years back when the Xbox One was still in development, word came that Kinect, its motion and audio sensor controller, would be required to use the console and Kinect would always be listening for voice commands to start the console. This caused something of a freak-out among gamers, who feared Microsoft would be listening.'

Comments

Re:Star Trek computer

[Sowelu]

Cool. Sounds like a really nice thing to have...on a military vessel. Less so around the house.

an objective analysis

[nimbius]

Im sure plenty of slashdotters will invest time and effort in explaining how this can be manipulated by unscrupulous hackers and foreign intelligence agencies to undermine user security. Yet other slashdotters will wax prophetic on how the erosion of our freedoms at the hands of malevolent corporations will be our downfall

I on the otherhand am offering a completely different take on this Skylake report. As a coincidental shareholder in the tinfoil industry I believe Skylake and other technologies will be a win-win for all parties involved: consumers, producers, and the spider people of Adramalech the dark Samarian god to whom children are sacrificed...remember, without your patented TIN FOIL helmet, Skylark will inform them of how many licks it took YOU to get to the center of the tootsie roll pop.

Re:an objective analysis

[s.petry]

"Objective" does not mean what you think it does. Now go on back to your fantasy about how your opinion is so much better than everyone else and let the grown ups talk.

Re:an objective analysis

[Locke2005]

The DSP still requires a microphone to be physically attached in order to "hear" anything, so it should be fairly easy to physically disable -- just put a switch in the microphone circuit, or simply unplug it. Not as easy as putting masking tape over the web cam, but still easy enough for most people.

Re:an objective analysis

[arglebargle_xiv]

Im sure plenty of slashdotters will invest time and effort in explaining how this can be manipulated by unscrupulous hackers and foreign intelligence agencies to undermine user security.

Actually I'm more curious as to why this is "new". I could do the same thing with a 20-year-old PC with a sound card (I'm limiting it at 20 years to get some sort of reasonable Pentium with MMX, before that you start to run into CPU horsepower problems depending on what you want to do with the capability), why is it some "feature" of Skylake?

Re:an objective analysis

[TheRaven64]

The 'new' part is that you can shut down the main CPU entirely and just have a very low-power DSP (and microphone) running. Is put new in quotes, because a number of ARM SoCs have shipped with this feature for a year or two.

Re:an objective analysis

[beastofburdon]

No, that would be stupid. There is too much noise coming from those and the case is rarely that close to your mouth. Where they would put it is in the keyboard or monitor(SMART TV).

Why does the CPU need this?

[LichtSpektren]

Wouldn't it make more sense to have a voice-activated power button on the frame, rather than the CPU doing this?

Re:Why does the CPU need this?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, because then you could disable it.

Re:Why does the CPU need this?

[denis-The-menace]

It's called Intel Management Engine (ME)

The management engine provides remote access capabilities, independently from the running operating system. It has full access to your RAM, and it has full networking support. It also handles the TPM module, AMT (Active Management Technology), Boot Guard and various DRM mechanisms. The ME also performs some basic hardware initialization and power management, on recent systems.

http://libreboot.org/faq/#inte...

Re:Why does the CPU need this?

[DigiShaman]

I know servers have it, but I'm guessing modern computers now have a fully functional IPMI bus?

Re: Why does the CPU need this?

[gl4ss]

faster than cpu normally hahahahahaahah
hahahahahaha
hahahahah

no, really hahahha. it's not about that. you need the hw implementation so you can only run the hw implementation when the device is off, so you can turn the machine on.

Re:Why does the CPU need this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Vernor Vinge called this years ago in his novel Rainbow's End. He predicted a SHE. Secure Hardware Environment.

A chunk of silicon+software on every PC that will be used by government to spy, police and tax every operation on the computer.

No-one should ever, ever have allowed a TPM in their machine. It was just the start.

Re: Why does the CPU need this?

[adolf]

Fine, then: It's to turn the machine on, while being ridiculously low-power in doing so.

And maaaybe faster/better than the CPU: While ARM/Android is nothing in speed compared to Intel's latest-and-greatest whatever, there are cell phones with dedicated voice processing chips such as the Moto X.

My sister, last Christmas, was showing off her new Moto X. It was a family party-type-environment, and so had plenty of voice-range noise going on. She yells across the room at her phone: "Hey phone send a text to adolf `I'm talking to my phone.'"

Seconds later, my own phone woke up with an SMS message, with that text.

These aren't the world's first forays into dedicated hardware speech processing. I can think of other things from the past, such as IBM's MWave, which (despite new CPUs seeming just as fast then, as new CPUs seem now) did a far better job than software alone on a general-purpose CPU.

Sure, this will sell like hot cakes!

[Anonymous Coward]

"We made a new processor! It's not any faster but it has an always on mic and exposes a remote-control interface you know nothing about. Oh and did I mention the random generator is biased? You'll love it"

Re:Sure, this will sell like hot cakes!

[TechyImmigrant]

>Oh and did I mention the random generator is biased?

Would you like to substantiate that with evidence?
I know you can't. You know you can't.
What is your motivation for saying these things?

Re:Sure, this will sell like hot cakes!

[TheRaven64]

The problem is that it's very hard to detect, if it is true. Modern pseudo-random number generators use a block cypher and can provide output that will meet all statistical tests that you throw at it, but can be easy to compromise if you know the key. If you were the NSA, then you'd want to have some bits in the key known / predictable, but the rest provided by random electrical fluctuation so that anyone else brute-forcing the key would have to search the entire space, but you'd only have to search a much smaller space. For this reason, it's best not to trust hardware random number generators entirely. Using them as an entropy source for Fortuna is fine though (as long as they're not the only entropy source).

Re:Sure, this will sell like hot cakes!

[TechyImmigrant]

You are missing the point.

AC made an assertion he knows that he or she doesn't know. It was a lie.
I know it to be a lie because I know the circuit. Several other people on this planet know enough to know it is a lie.
Other people don't know, which is just how the universe works.

If you are interested in testing random numbers, you are welcome to buy my book on the subject when I finish writing it in about 20 years.

Re:Sure, this will sell like hot cakes!

[TechyImmigrant]

What is your motivation for saying these things?

Distrust of an untustworthy government, I'd imagine.

How about you prove him wrong, if you feel so strongly about Intel's virtue?

Proof is for mathematicians. Oh look, here's one: https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/5...

Imagination Land

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't imagine a much bigger waste of silicon than this.

Re:Imagination Land

[viperidaenz]

Wait a minute, which current consumer operating system doesn't have some kind of voice control software? (FYI: It's not the year of the Linux Desktop just yet)

There's Siri, Google Now and Cortana.

How is dedicated hardware to decrease power consumption a waste of silicon?

You need a better imagination.

Re:Imagination Land

[TheRaven64]

It's a mobile processor. It will be in laptops, if not in tablets. Power saving in laptops is still important.

Re:Star Trek computer

[Anonymous Coward]

I must admit I am having fun with the voice commands.

I would say it is about 95%ish accurate in decoding what I say.

However, if you get off script in what it knows it just takes the command and dumps it on the default search you have setup (google for me).

'open steam' apparently means open some random game with steam in the name. Which is not what I wanted.
'open weather' means open the built in weather app. Which is what I wanted.
'will it rain' and it will give me a nice summary of the current weather and 'guess'.
'shutdown the computer' apparently means open up firefox and google for it.

It is also a 'slow cpu' drain. In the background the DSP audio service built into windows is always listening. So it is eating a bit of CPU (about .05%) just from ambient noise. Yesterday the one of the 3 cortana background apps decided to crash wildly. It kept crashing and restarting at a rate of about 30 times a second. No dumps or anything. Just a small 1-2% cpu usage. Reboot and it was all well but no indication of what was going on.

Turn on?

[gurps_npc]

Oh, I see, this has a special, vibration sensitive electrical switch that you tune to your voice. So when your voice and only your voice says "Computer" (in a thick, fake Scottish accent in memory of the WWII hero James Doohan), will trigger a mechanical switch that lets electricity flow into your computer.

What? That's not what's going on? You mean the PC is always on in sleep mode, listening to everything thing you say and analyzing it for the words "Computer on", which will take it out of sleep mode? Assuming of course someone hasn't hacked it to record audio (and maybe video) all the time, because sleep mode is NOT the same as off.

Re:Turn on?

[gurps_npc]

Yes he married an 18 year old, that he met at 17. But let's be honest here, 99% of men in the world lust after 18 year old girls. Just as 99% of women lust after men with big...."Q" scores. (fame). Doohan had a huge Q score.

The point of the law is not to shame people for almost breaking it, but instead to convince them to abide by it. James Doohan abided by the law. Leave the great man alone.

Re:Turn on?

[Locke2005]

Correction: 99% of _straight_ men find 18 year old girls sexually attractive. (For a non-straight men example, see Sam Adams, ex-mayor of Portland) Most of us, unlike a certain ex-Subway spokesman, have the good sense not to act on that attraction. Remember, if it's a day after her/his 18th b-day, it's ok, but if it's a day before, you're in Fogle territory!

Re:Turn on?

[Austerity Empowers]

I think in the dephinition of *ophile is that the condition both is so extreme that the victim has difficulty controlling his impulses in accordance with the laws of his lands, and prefers this particular age group almost to the exclusion of all others. To actually diagnose him with a problem requires way more information than the age of his first wife. So really this is just an anal vibration that his PC has entered into the slashdot comment box, go Skylake.

Almost all men (and it says this somewhere) find women increasingly attractive as they progress through puberty and afterwards. Most of us however will not focus on this age group to all exclusion, nor will we disobey laws. A 17yo female is a fully grown adult in most cases, so it really doesn't even seem like this falls into any juvenile category. In reality this is just biology. Secondary sex characteristics, and the male fondness for them are not accidents, and are not coincidentally developed at puberty as the female reaches fertility. The actual problem with all this is purely social, and a consequence of how our cultures deal with sex and its consequences. But, someone who is not actually insane, is capable of complying with the laws even if he both doesn't agree with them, and also finds that young girl unusually attractive for some reason.

Contrast this with "Jared" of Subway fame, who allegedly both propositioned a minor for sex but also allegedly requested she bring younger friends. That's a sign of someone with a real problem who probably needs to at least be kept away from minors.

I think people just learn these words on the internets and like to start using them inappropriately, as with autism and Asperger's.

Re:Turn on?

[HornWumpus]

They're pretty, but then they talk. Child snaps to focus.

Re:Oh, yes..

[Fire_Wraith]

XBox Shut Off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Cool!

[thiscodeguy]

Cool!

Useful?

[GrahamJ]

So touching the mouse or a key is too difficult I guess?

Re:Useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

My hand has become grafted to my penis, you insensitive clod.

Re:Useful?

[Locke2005]

Push-to-talk is kind of a pain-in-the-ass, yes. Especially if the microphone is across the room, in your entertainment system. Amazon's Echo is selling entirely based on the premise that it is always listening.

Re:Useful?

[GrahamJ]

If I wanted my entertainment PC to always be listening I'd leave it on, but I suppose there is power to be saved doing it this way.

Open source command interface?

[buchner.johannes]

Is there any open-source voice command interface? Something simple, which runs commands?

I would even be happy if I could record some commands and define what to run when I say that. Or if it had some learning interface where I can define "oh I meant that existing command, next time you know this pronounciation variant".

I don't see the problem

[jetkust]

I haven't read anything that indicates the chip does anything other than listen for specific speech patterns and send specific commands to the computer (actually power on is really the only thing I can tell it actually does). I doubt there is any way of retrieving the audio input from the chip. They would have to go out of their way to even incorporate this capability which if it existed would pretty much mean a large number of people wouldn't buy the chip. So until some hacker actually successfully retrieves anything the chip actually records (which I doubt is possible), I think this is a step ahead. I would definitely want this capability.

Re:I don't see the problem

[DigiShaman]

The problem is that we have valuable die real-estate being taken up by this shit when additional L1/L2 cache, a core, or other SIMD instruction sets would be better. The market is full of DSP chips, why this, and why on the fucking die!

Re:I don't see the problem

[viperidaenz]

Because no one makes DSP's on 14nm process, so they'll all use more power.
Because putting an additional chip in a device makes it bigger.
Because they probably couldn't even fit an extra 100kb in the space a speech DSP takes up. (L1 and L2 cache aren't small because of die area, L3 is on-die too)

Re:I don't see the problem

[jetkust]

How does the argument go from Microsoft and the government spying on us to I want to redesign the processor to have more cache and instructions?

Re:I don't see the problem

[DRJlaw]

The problem is that we have valuable die real-estate being taken up by this shit when additional L1/L2 cache, a core, or other SIMD instruction sets would be better. The market is full of DSP chips, why this, and why on the fucking die!

Because a separate chip, additional chip-to-chip interconnect, and additional PCB-type lithography is far more expensive than on-die lithography?

For instance, USB 3 really took off when Intel integrated USB3 into their chipsets. With the 6-series chipsets, USB 3 was a more expensive feature requiring a separate chip - NEC, Asmedia, etc. - and you pretty much would only find it on premium or gamer motherboards. With the 7-series chipsets, it was everywhere.

Intel is trying to incorporate more cheap-to-provide features to support their existing consumer price point and give you a reason to upgrade. You're free to buy chips with more cores or more L3 cache -- they're on socket LGA 2011 and they'll cost far more than a DSP using a far smaller quantity of this "valuable die real-estate" (254 mm2 versus 356 mm2 for the 22nm Haswell parts).

Re:I don't see the problem

[amorsen]

The problem is that we have valuable die real-estate being taken up by this shit when additional L1/L2 cache, a core, or other SIMD instruction sets would be better.

L1/L2 caches have hit the maximum sizes you can build before the added latency of larger caches makes the trade-off fail. You can do L3, but the performance benefit is not very impressive for desktop workloads and if you are Intel you do not want your desktop chips eating your server market. Extra cores, same deal: great for server tasks, not for the desktop. SIMD just does not take up significant die space, and the gains are minuscule except for specialized workloads.

Intel is pretty desperate to find something to use transistors for.

Re:I don't see the problem

[Sloppy]

Apparently one of the justifications for spending space on such a ridiculously specialized task, is that in the rare event that it's being used, some of the other stuff (e.g. the general-purpose parts) might have a brief opportunity to cool off a bit. Your bigger cache wouldn't have that advantage, because you'd be using it so often.

Some say often-dark silicon will be a growing trend.

Re:I don't see the problem

[thegarbz]

Because the market wants this. Either it'll be a hit, or it will disappear into the idea obscurity bin. You're banking on the latter. Time will tell what the majority who part with money decide.

Re:I don't see the problem

[TheRaven64]

I have two words for you: Dark silicon.

Since the end of Dennard scaling, the transistor budget for new chips has kept increasing, but the powered transistor budget has not (or, at least, at a much lower rate). More L1 or L2 that needs to be powered all of the time is not easily affordable, but something that only runs when most of the rest of the chip is powered down is basically free (especially something as small as a DSP for voice). Expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing: features that give a big speedup or power saving when in use, but are not in use most of the time, are increasingly attractive additions to modern CPUs.

Re:I don't see the problem

[DigiShaman]

Well that just goes contrary to my understanding of what the main CPU is supposed to do, crunch data, and as much of it efficiently as possible in the smallest package available. TDP rating be damned if it can handle it! If it's dark, it's wasted die space. Specialized hardware that's rarely used (relatively speaking) should resides outside of it via PCIe bus assuming latency and bandwidth considerations are met within the predefined scope of capability and need. Again, just my view on it. And because we're talking about PC CPUs, I don't see why a modern desktop process should be the equivalent of a SoC (System On a Chip). Ergo leaving dark silicon in place as video, wifi, audio, etc. Though for bandwidth and performance reasons, I get why the memory controller is on die. The video, however efficient the Intel HD stuff is, really should be external.

Re:I don't see the problem

[TheRaven64]

Well that just goes contrary to my understanding of what the main CPU is supposed to do, crunch data, and as much of it efficiently as possible in the smallest package available

Why? Especially in a desktop package, space isn't a constraint. Die area is cheap, heat dissipation is expensive. Your choices are either add some rarely-used coprocessors in the available space, or don't use the space. The cost is the same in both cases.

Specialized hardware that's rarely used (relatively speaking) should resides outside of it via PCIe bus assuming latency and bandwidth considerations are met

Latency is one big issue. Another is power. Off-chip communication is slow and very power intensive. The ARM GPUs, for example, compute a hash of each tile before writing it off to the frame buffer, and if the hash is the same as the last time then they don't write it. That extra computation, which only saves a fraction of the total writes is still a net win for power.

I find it slightly ironic that you use SIMD as a counter example. SIMD is precisely the kind of thing that I'm talking about: something that's a big win for some workloads and can be powered off most of the time.

Kinda primitive

[fustakrakich]

I thought we could control our machines with brain waves...

Re:Oh, yes..

[ArmoredDragon]

I would think one of the shiny new instruction features added to skylake could go horribly horribly wrong in basically the worst way you could possibly imagine:

http://slashdot.org/firehose.p...

Basically, imagine code running on your computer that you aren't allowed to see even at the binary level, which means anti-malware software cannot scan it, and you can't debug it if you suspect it is doing something malicious, and even worse, I suspect that groups like the NSA could NSL the keys so that they could write their own state sponsored backdoors. IMO this is a feature that really doesn't belong on consumer grade hardware.

Re:Star Trek computer

[Locke2005]

Sure, but the computer is Galaxy Quest was only listening to ONE person (Sigourney Weaver). In fact, her one and only job was to repeat any questions to the computer, then repeat the computer's response back to the questioner...

Strange game

[WaffleMonster]

I think hardware support for voice recognition would be awesome if it can be leveraged to provide a usefully accurate local recognition capability.

Yet I very much doubt this will ever happen because the whole point of voice recognition these days seems to be nothing more than an excuse to send data to MS / Apple / Google / Nuance / LEA / whomever.

Re:Oh, yes..

[HornWumpus]

One more vote against Systems Management Mode.

Problem is the NSA and their overreach

[Nyder]

I see a problem with this because of the NSA and their overreach into our private lives. They are already recording our phone calls, they already have access into the internet. So do we really want to have our computer's mic constantly hearing our conversations? MS records what your mic hears for Cortana's "improvement", what stops them from handing it over to the NSA?

Years ago I'd be considered crazy for this, but now with the NSA being who they the are, can you trust them? Can you trust MS? Can you trust your government. The same government that wants to do away with encryption?

Probably depends on the chipset

[l2718]

The "Intel Active Management" (a governor that runs on a secondary CPU independent of the primary one, with cryptographically signed firmware and autonomous access to LAN, WiFi, Memory etc) is also quite disconcerting, but in fact only inclued on certain chipsets (see the tables for Broadwell and Skylake). Unless you are a large institution you probably don't want remote management capabilities.

It's hard to find which chipsets will feature this DSP but quite possibly some won't. Pay attention when you buy your motherboard and all will be well.

Re: Star Trek computer

[binarylarry]

Initiate fap session.

Why is everybody so upset with this kind of thing?

[SleepyHappyDoc]

I don't understand it.

Re:Star Trek computer

[Anne Thwacks]

I would say it is about 95%ish accurate in decoding what I say.

I speak very standard English - sound like Prince Charles - and I would say it is close to 0% accurate.

As to why it needs a DSP to process speech - bit rate typically under 10khz - that is an even greater mystery. I think you will find that the processor in your typically MP3 player (probably a very sad 8051 clone) has way more than enough power to do analogue to digital. Unfortunately, even large mainframes with massive amounts of disk storage cannot actually recognise speech. This processor must not just be "always on" but always connected to mothership! What about those of us who have piss-poor ISPs!

Where can I down load an open source tin-foil hat upgrade?

Re:Oh, yes..

[Anonymous Coward]

Paraphrased quote from NTK (years ago!).

I'm going to run into a room full of people working and shout "Quit. Don't save."

Re:Star Trek computer

[TheRaven64]

I remember a friend showing me the Mac built-in speech command stuff back around 1997. It wasn't a great demo: it seemed to interpret everything that he said as 'shut down the computer'. A few years later, this userfriendly comic showed a good reason why voice command is a bad idea.

Re:Why is everybody so upset with this kind of thi

[SleepyHappyDoc]

My question is, so what? So what if the NSA is listening to everything? Let's assume the worst...that when I buy a Skylake PC, it can and does record everything that is said in my home and sends it to the NSA for storage and analysis. So what? For one thing, it'll be boring as shit, hours of me snoring, that sort of thing. Continuing the worst case, let's assume they can mine all this voice data perfectly, and can detect any time I talk about committing a crime or otherwise anti-government act. I'm a normal, boring, law abiding person. They won't find anything. I strongly suspect that 99% of the world is like me in this respect, too boring for the NSA to give a shit about.