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March 13, 2008

The Future Of Voice May Be Voiceless

Duncan Riley

34 comments »

The above video is a little rough in terms of processing delay, but it’s staggering. Voice without voice.

According to New Scientist, the neckband translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals; “with careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerized voice.”

The system is called the Audeo, and currently understands 150 words and phrases. Applications range from cell phones, VOIP, IM (including voice to text recognition) and services for those who have lost their voice.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 2:17 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. » The Birth of Telepathy » Lee Clemmer {dot} com

    March 13th, 2008 at 6:23 am

  2. Μεταδοση φωνης χωρις.. ηχο! | zero.gr

    March 19th, 2008 at 1:36 pm

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  1. jeek

    March 13th, 2008 at 2:23 am

    ^_^ http://gamepver.com

  2. nishu

    March 13th, 2008 at 2:35 am

    ^ I guess previous comment is spam..

    BTW.. nice concept ..it can extend beyond being used by people who lost their voice.

  3. Jan

    March 13th, 2008 at 2:35 am

    is it april 1st yet?

  4. Josh

    March 13th, 2008 at 2:38 am

    In the video it’s very hard to pick up when he ’says’ a reply - it just looks like he is staring intensely at the other guy, and nothing is happening. Awkward…

    Awesome technology though.

  5. Rachel

    March 13th, 2008 at 2:40 am

    Well, what if someone thinks a random dirty thought? Oh what trouble he/she would get into! Haha.

  6. EJ Fox

    March 13th, 2008 at 2:48 am

    I was more excited about this technology before I saw the video. I’d imagined something nice- like the subvocal communication in Orson Scott Card’s speaker for the dead books.

    However this demo looked truly horrible. It’s a really cool idea, but it OBVIOUSLY has a lot of space to go. Why are these people presenting it already? And in that fashion? Not very impressive at all, to be honest.

  7. Gus

    March 13th, 2008 at 3:10 am

    Hmm. On the par with - ‘look everybody, I’ve gouged my eyes out and replaced them with these really cool HD CCDs!’. We have a brilliant technology for communicating though to others - it’s called the human voice. If the application of this is to communicate without informing the people around you, is that any worse than looking like you’re having a seizure?

  8. felder

    March 13th, 2008 at 3:15 am

    cellular operatots are about to vanish

  9. steve

    March 13th, 2008 at 3:48 am

    also, just think of how much more productive and humane interrogations will become.

  10. TH

    March 13th, 2008 at 3:50 am

    Brilliant system. #5, this doesn’t pick up random thoughts, it gets its input from the nerves you use to control your vocal cords, so you’d need to think about it and prentend to be saying it.

    #7, had you read the article or watched the video you’d have noticed that it’s for people who have lost their voices or for situations where you can’t use it. Also you don’t need to mutilate your vocal cords to use this, just like you don’t need to take out your eyes to use a digital camera or binoculars. The whole concept of using neural input to control computers of course has huge potential (there are of course lots of projects going on in this area), and while it’s usefulness might at the moment be limited, the fact that they have a full, working system that does it is brilliant. Technology isn’t all bad, you should try it sometimes. :-)

  11. Daniel

    March 13th, 2008 at 4:56 am

    That’s sick! I’m now officially scared.

  12. Chris Schilling

    March 13th, 2008 at 5:24 am

    Wow…..I am sure that this will have the military machine folks licking their chops….

    The implications are pretty scary…

  13. Laloj

    March 13th, 2008 at 5:33 am

    http://www.tech-exposed.com

    Really cool technology and imagine how many throat cancer patients this can help and improve their quality of life

  14. Lee

    March 13th, 2008 at 6:16 am

    I think #12 is on to something, military is the first thing I thought about. Think about tactical squads or soldiers on the battlefield being able to communicate without making a sound, now that’s a competitive advantage. Or what about spying, being able to transmit sensitive information in real-time without anyone ever knowing… probably getting ahead of myself here, but what if you could implant one of these things, in addition to a receiver implant in your ear. Now we’re talking telepathy. How would you prosecute someone who communicates through such a channel and, for example, reveals trade secrets - corporate espionage.

    Does this imply a thought police in 50 years?

  15. jbscpa

    March 13th, 2008 at 6:23 am

    the speaker says, “just like in the early days of speech recognition”

    We are still in the “early days” of speech recognition.

    It doesn’t work either for practical purposes.

  16. cap

    March 13th, 2008 at 6:49 am

    While this innovation has a lot of room for improvement, it may offer people with disabilities to communicate effectively with the rest of the world. This device has some awesome implications for the future.

  17. Phil Dewey

    March 13th, 2008 at 7:24 am

    How exciting! This is going to revive the lost art of ventriloquism!!!

  18. gregory

    March 13th, 2008 at 7:37 am

    oh, man, this is the future, at about the stage of, say internal combustion engines, when they learned to cast blocks, or before the spark plug

    50 years from now somebody will write a phd thesis on this

    thought-controlled devices will be sooo normal, within the life span of most tc readers

  19. Anthony

    March 13th, 2008 at 8:48 am

    LMAFO @ #17

    I definitely see the possibilities for military application, Lee. Unfortunately the possibilities for interrogations wouldn’t really come about unless we developed a device that could straight up read thoughts rather than intended speech such as this device does.

  20. Ming Yeow

    March 13th, 2008 at 9:45 am

    scary stuff! the question is how “upstream” it is able to detect the thoughts eventually. Right now, it is probably pretty downstream, ie near the “speaking point”

  21. Robert Einspruch

    March 13th, 2008 at 10:11 am

    This is totally insane! But cool. If everyone had one of this and a receiver, think of how much easier it will be to pick up women in a really loud bar :-)

  22. roupen

    March 13th, 2008 at 11:13 am

    Hah! After being taken by the charge-an-ipod-with-an-onion video, I am dubious of such “amazing” things that appear on video. If not for the audience applause in this video, I’d say a creative someone coulda faked it ;-) Cool technology but I’ve just been burned by the ipod-onion thing. So unless I see it, I am skeptical of videos promoting radically new idea ;-)

  23. Stan Oleynick

    March 13th, 2008 at 12:33 pm

    Amazing tech, can’t wait to see what the future holds for it!!

  24. David Kahn

    March 13th, 2008 at 5:31 pm

    Hillary Clinton should get one of these. She says she found her voice, but she keeps on losing it!

  25. Pedro Yi

    March 14th, 2008 at 3:11 am

    With new solutions come along new problems. Internet came and now we’re all accountable for the content of every singe e-mail that we write and send through the internet - we just cannot say “I didn’t write this” because all e-mails are securely stored in some server for a long time and they are accessible to federal police and we have no privacy when law enforced disclosure is concerned. In a few centuries time, a similar device will be compulsory to each human being to wear and every thought will be translated into words, traced, tracked and stored in a gigantic server named General Order Database aka GOD…

  26. Elizabeth

    March 14th, 2008 at 9:31 am

    que legal

  27. Blah

    March 14th, 2008 at 6:19 pm

    B u m m e r

    The video is no longer available.

  28. Mia

    March 15th, 2008 at 12:47 pm

    Bom…
    a idéia é realmente interessante. Ótimo para mudos não surdos, ou quem perdera a voz por motivo peculiar.

    Pensei que alguem realmente tivesse criado algo fantástico (nesse sentido) até assistir ao vídeo.
    É evidente que ainda há muito o que se aperfeiçoar, tanto na questão da idéia, quanto no equipamento. (Manuseio, mobilidade, etc…)

    Mas de qualquer forma é de idéias assim que precisamos!
    Brilhante!
    Imatura mas que merece ser investida.

  29. Elayne

    March 16th, 2008 at 6:23 am

    Caramba, tô passada, o futuro é o presente, nunca eu iria pensar que um computador leria a mente humana.
    Fodástico!

  30. dj michel

    March 16th, 2008 at 6:44 pm

    eu ja axo q a tecnologia vem avançando de forma q, nos vamos ter cada vez mas nossa privacidade invadida,imagina um pc lendo sua mente , eu axo q essa tecnologia nao sera enquadrada so apenas para a telefonia , se for para esse uso tudo bem é realmente um maravilhoso artefato .

  31. Austin Storm

    March 17th, 2008 at 12:06 am

    This could be so amazing and beautiful! Thanks for posting it, off the beaten path though it may be.

  32. Marlon

    March 25th, 2008 at 7:11 pm

    I can’t hear shit!
    Não ouvi porra nenhuma…

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