Sounds completely crazy but researchers at an electronics show have been demonstrating technology that will allow you to hold silent conversations on your mobile phone. Really!
The implications of it are pretty cool especially if you are like many others who are fed up of being forced to listen to other people’s mobile phone conversations when out and about.
If you’ve ever had to endure a bus, train or plane trip next to someone who is incessantly chatting on their phone you’ll know what an absolute nightmare it can be.
The idea for the new technology came when Professor Tanja Shultz of the Karsruhe Institute of Technology had to endure such a journey on public transport.
“I was taking the train and the person sitting next to me was constantly chatting and I thought ‘I need to change this’” the professor told BBC News. “We call it silent communication.”
Sounds blissful!
The technology works by measuring the electrical signals produced by our muscles when we talk, a technique known as electromyography.
The beauty of it is we don’t have to actually utter the words audibly for the technology to pick up these signals and use them to produce synthesised speech on another phone.
Basically all you have to do is silently mouth what you want to say and the person you are ‘talking’ to on the other end of the phone gets to hear your words. Ok so it’s not quite the same as hearing your voice but who cares.
A prototype of the technology was recently on display at the CeBIT electronics show in Germany and involved placing a number of electrodes on a user’s face in order to capture the signals.
These signals were then recorded, amplified, transmitted to a laptop via Bluetooth where software then ‘translated’ them into text which was then spoken by a speech synthesiser.
You just knew it wouldn’t be as simple and straightforward as lip reading didn’t you?
It’s still early days but the technology does have massive implications for the future, not just for cutting out annoying chit chat on the train but as Professor Shultz pointed out, for people who have lost their voice through illness or accidents, or for translating foreign languages.
“You could speak in your mother tongue and the text could be translated into another language” she said. “The person that you are communicating with would then hear the synthesised voice in the other language.”
Sounds great!
