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

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.

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?

[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...

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: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...

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!