Remember when everyone was up in arms over the Xbox One's Kinect 'always listening'? Since the paranoia over that is done with something else want to listen to you, your PC. Intel's sixth-generation Intel Core processor, Skylake, will always be listening for two or three words.
"Hey, Cortana" and "Cortana, wake up."
A demonstration during the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco revealed that those words would wake up any sleeping Windows 10 PC running with a Skylake processor. Technically, this feature was available in last year's processor — but Windows 10 wasn't out yet.
The Skylake processor is able to manage this "always listening" attitude because of a low-power digital signal processor (DSP) built right into the chip. Intel didn't specify if PC's would require anything more than the new processor to use this feature or how much power this feature would consume. If your dreams have been of yelling across the room at your computer to turn on, this is it… your dream come true. Now, if you could continue yelling commands like "Start PLEX" and to go to a certain file on PLEX… That would be handy for the most lazy of nights.
Granted, all of this ok if you don't mind the government listening in on what you do (or that computer will know when you're cheating on it with your PS4 or Xbox One).
Obviously, all of the listening can be avoided by simply turning off your PC.
[Gizmodo]
