Still getting used to all those people with Bluetooth headsets walking down the street appearing to talk to themselves? Get ready for the still stranger sight of people talking to themselves--without making any noise.
Researchers from Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology are working on a system that converts mouth motions into synthesized speech, thus laying the groundwork for soundless cell phone calls (and ironically making us want to screech loudly in delight).
The technology relies on electromyograph --a technique for recording electrical activity produced by muscles--to detect facial movements made while chatting. Once recorded, the pulses are transmitted to a device that records and amplifies them, then sends them along to a laptop via Bluetooth. Software turns the signals into text, which can then be spoken by a synthesizer.
The soundless-speech getup, displayed last week at the CeBit tech fair in Hannover, Germany, currently requires nine electrodes to be attached to the user's face, which sure seems like a lot of trouble for a quieter train ride or moviegoing experience--and creates a Frankenstein effect more likely to attract attention than even the loudest phone blabbing.
But while the system probably won't be showing up in the average cell phone quite yet, it could initially be used to aid people who have lost their voice to illness or to instantly translate languages.
NASA has looked into the technique to enable communication in noisy environments like the Space Station, Shultz said. It could also be used to transmit confidential information like passwords and PINs--and, of course, really good office gossip.
Researchers from Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology are working on a system that converts mouth motions into synthesized speech, thus laying the groundwork for soundless cell phone calls (and ironically making us want to screech loudly in delight).
The technology relies on electromyograph --a technique for recording electrical activity produced by muscles--to detect facial movements made while chatting. Once recorded, the pulses are transmitted to a device that records and amplifies them, then sends them along to a laptop via Bluetooth. Software turns the signals into text, which can then be spoken by a synthesizer.
The soundless-speech getup, displayed last week at the CeBit tech fair in Hannover, Germany, currently requires nine electrodes to be attached to the user's face, which sure seems like a lot of trouble for a quieter train ride or moviegoing experience--and creates a Frankenstein effect more likely to attract attention than even the loudest phone blabbing.
But while the system probably won't be showing up in the average cell phone quite yet, it could initially be used to aid people who have lost their voice to illness or to instantly translate languages.
NASA has looked into the technique to enable communication in noisy environments like the Space Station, Shultz said. It could also be used to transmit confidential information like passwords and PINs--and, of course, really good office gossip.
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