MSI Makes Motherboards Voice-Activated

Operating systems may already integrate voice recognition and responses, but Micro-Star International decided to take the concept to something of a logical extreme, according to reports.

There is little doubt that few people alive today at least once ran into the concept of voice-activated technology.

Many are the science fiction movies where someone walked into a room and began ordering their computer, or other appliances, about.

One might say that sort of future is not really too far off, knowing how operating systems of today, like Windows, have speech recognition.

Still, the feature is not perfect, since strange accents can render the feature null, for instance, or lead to hilarious situations where one tries to issue a command only for the words to be misinterpreted.

There is also a certain other issue that technology faces, namely that fact that, being OS-based, speech recognitions can't really offer total control over a PC.

Micro-Star International aims to bring the power of voice to OS-independent ACPI functions, the ones held in the BIOS and such.

More specifically, the company is working on the “Voice Activated Motherboard” technology, which will let someone order to PC to turn on, turn off (OS shutdown or forced) or suspend the PC until renewed log-on.

A daughterboard will be required (will work on the PCI Express x1 interface), one with a special header (JDLED3), plus a mic/line input (some recent motherboards already have this JDLED3).

Micro-Star International also has the Voice Genie software in store for its prospective customers, one that will let users make their own voice commands.

What remains is to see if MSI, as some of the folks behind the report pointed out, implements the command to suspend voice recognition, since accidentally turning the PC off or restarting it because one happens to speak the correct phrase in a different context would be unnecessarily grating.