Silent Sound Technology

Don't you hate those annoying people that are always yelling into their phones “CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? HOW ABOUT NOW?”

Or when you're walking along a busy street or riding the bus and have to talk louder over the din. Hell even those situations where you don't want to be overheard talking to your friends on the phone can get a bit tedious.

But fear no longer! Research is now being done into creating a new Silent Sound Technology!

Check it out HERE.

During the CeBIT (Centrum der Büro- und Informationstechnik; German for "Centre of Office and Information technology") of 2010 researchers revealed their ideas of creating a device that can be used for mobile phones that will translate lip and facial muscle movement into sound.

This means that effectively with this new technology we can have silent conversations and allow the tech do the talking for us!

The research is being concluded in the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and uses “electromyography, monitoring tiny muscular movements that occur when we speak and converting them into electrical pulses that can then be turned into speech”.

You may be asking yourself “so what? It's a phone conversations we're supposed to talk!”. But the implications of this go a step further, allowing people with voice box damage resulting in a loss of or severe voice damage to talk once more!

This technology may be a bit expensive as of now as they currently “use electrodes which are glued to the skin”. However one day soon these electrodes be incorporated into our cellphones according to Michael Wand, from the KIT.

Another intriguing aspect of this technology will be it's ability to translate into other languages, allowing you to silently speak and have your friends in Germany or France understand you in their native tongue!

Problems with this aspect emerge however in languages such as Chinese or Japanese where tone of voice (something a computer cannot duplicate) have significant meaning, and can change the meaning of certain words.

Which I guess does put a certain cap on the ammount of inter-lingual prank calls you can make!

The accuracy of the equipment is quite staggering, running at 99% efficiency and oly getting one word in every one hundred wrong, which if you think about it, is probably much better than the average person would score.

My only concern thus far is that when these become widely available, it sounds as though we are going to have to press the entire phone to our faces.

And also, will this be an application that we have to turn off and on? Because somehow I imagine trying to hold an actual conversation while the computer is simultaneously parroting every word we say. But at the same time, having to switch half way through a conversation, and then switch back again would get pretty annoying pretty quickly!

I suppose the filp side for that though is, even if it does create extra hassel, it may all be worth it for added privacey when telling people personal information over the phone, unless of course you happen to be in a room full of lip readers!

So I think we can be expecting these little beauties anytime between 5 and 10 years from now.

Don't forget to book yours people!