A new Intel partnership may finally bring Siri to the desktop

Intel is adding speech recognition features to its system-on-chips (SoC) via a partnership with Sensory.

Any manufacturer using Intel’s Skylake, Anniedale, Broxton, Broadwell and Merrifield SoCs can get Sensory’s TrulyHandsfree speech recognition features. Sensory says TrulyHandsfree SoCs will ship direct from Intel.

The technology features a proprietary low power sound detection, which only wakes the voice recognition engine with keywords like “Hey Siri” or “Okay Google.” Sensory also says TrulyHansfree is accurate when there’s a lot of background noise.

Sensory CEO Todd Mozer says “by working with Intel to offer deeply embedded ports of our TrulyHandsfree on their latest chips, we have made it simple for PC, tablet and smartphone manufacturers to enable voice wakeup to search or other functions from a low power always listening state.”

Though not explicitly stated, the implication we can draw is that this lowers the hurdles for Apple to add Siri functionality to its desktop devices. We’ve heard Siri would be coming to the desktop this Fall, but there was no hard details on how that might happen.

This move would make Apple more competitive with Google and Microsoft, whose respective digital assistants already reside on the desktop in one form or another. With a broad range of Intel SoCs taking advantage of TrulyHandsfree, that would also allow Apple to apply Siri to the desktop across its desktop lineup via hardware updates.