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Talk ... Without Speaking
mjm7 writes "Finally, we might be able to get rid of all those annoying people yelling over the static on their cell phones! CNN has an article about a new technology that senses muscle movements in your face and then translates them into sound. This way all you have to do is mouth words into the phone...not actually speak!" Somehow I suspect that we'd lose a lot of the
subtleties of communication, but it sure would be nice every time hemos calls me from the discotheque.
This might help voice recognition catch on as a means of PC input, too. I'd feel slightly less stupid sitting in my office mouthing words at my computer than I would actually talking to it.
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Yeah, this sounds like just the thing for people who want voice dictation, but work in a "noisy" environment. :-)
Alternatively, you could even have a microphone attached so that when you actually did speak, it would automatically disable the recognition - no more accidentally transcribing your half of a phone conversation for example. Wait a minute, I have to patent that idea!
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Think about it, don't most people move the muscles in their mouths slightly different when they are mouthing words, as opposed to actually speaking them? I would venture that the technology wouldn't be able to discern the subleties in the way we speak.
Other than that, it sounds like an interesting technology.
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
Is that this would be great for people who for one reason or another no longer have voiceboxes.
I had a great-aunt who lost a decent portion of her lungs to cancer and cigarettes, and up until her death a few years ago she had to use one of those darth-vader vibration-amplifier things like the "Ned" character does on south park. I was terrified of her when i was six.. (Give me a break, i was six years old and stupid.)
Anyway, i can imagine that technology like this would be just about perfect for people disabled in a similar manner through tobacco, cigarettes or who knows what. No? At least it would keep such people from having to deal with their idiot six-year-old-nephews reactions to the harsh sounds of the vibration amplifier box..
and really, even beyond that, tech like this would be just about the only option for people who are going through whatever that intensive vocal-node-therapy thing is where you're banned from speaking for six months. and i know a number of theatrical singers who would be intensely happy to have one of these so that they could rest their voices between performances without cutting themselves off from the world...
I hope that once this complete, they'll sell a unit where the voice-synth thing outputs into speakers rather than a phone.. I'm sure they would have looked into this possibility by now, right?
(P.S.: While we're on the subject, sort of.. just in case anyone reading knows: This came up as an argument the other night when we were watching the Oscars and examining how much pain Enye appeared to be in from having to exert her voice. What's the difference between a vocal node and a vocal nodule?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Combine it with an avatar and let the deaf read lips.
I just want a jewel in my ear that will let me communicate through subvocalizing to an all-knowing computer network/alien being (a la the Ender's Game universe)!
Was anybody else immediately reminded of the old Simon and Garfunkel tune, sounds of silence in particular the line about "people talking without speaking" (the link is a poor transcription).
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I would be very surprised if they can successfully and consistently measure the movements that result in diphthongs, as the muscle movements involved are extremely minimal.
Diphthongs, by the way, are why interfaces that attempt to "read lips" without the benefit of a phonetic dictionary of some kind (and preferably a context one as well) always fail miserably, to the eternal chagrin of the CIA.
Jouster
Couldn't someone use the movements in addition to the sound to filter out the actual speaker's voice from the background noise? This seems almost like a nonlinear Kalman filter application (though I am by no means an expert on such things), if you had a (presumably nonlinear) model for speech as a function of the movements of the mouth. The article didn't give too much detail. Oh well, it sounds interesting in the very least.
So, I wonder how the system works with inflection and stressed syllables. Would be a disaster for those domestic husband/wife disputes (not to mention Japanese which is almost *entirely* inflective):
*I* put the dishes away.
I *put* the dishes away.
I put the *dishes* away.
I put the dishes *away*.
Looks like we will still that Sprint guy hovering around for a while....
"Just because you're a genius doesn't make you a smart guy!" -- Narrator, Powerpuff Girls
Anybody ever pay attention to the sounds that the handlink makes on Quantum Leap? For example, it kind of goes 'waaaaahhhh' when he smacks it. That's the most obvious one, but if you listen a little more carefully, the sounds that little device makes start to emote. You can get an idea what he's reading on the screen before he actually states it.
Tom and Jerry is similar, to a degree. I ran across a cartoon of Tom and Jerry on the web a few days ago and watched it. I noticed something very interesting. The music in the cartoon responded to every little movement that the characters made. You listen to the music, for example, and tell if Jerry was tiptoe'ing or running. That was a very interesting dimension to Tom and Jerry. That is the type of element that would allow you to watch a slideshow of the show with the sound track and still keep track of what's going on.
This article was very interesting because I think it may be the start of making computer interfaces take advantage of audio responses that don't even require words. I've spent a great deal of time assigning different sounds in Windows to different events. For example, I have a very distinctive sound that ICQ makes when I recieve a message. I even went as far as to provide different people with different sounds. I noticed something very interesting, when I went to use ICQ on another machine, I ached to hear the sounds again. It was so strange not hearing them!
I hope one day Windows (or whatever OS I use in the future...) spends more effort into providing a sound-enhanced interface. That would truely provide better a better multi-tasking experience. It'd be cool if, for example, the window on the screen causing the sound was played through the right or left speaker based on where the window is on the screen. Maybe muffle it if a window is under it.
Anybody know of any products for Windows that do this today?
"Derp de derp."
Actually, that's old news. This is very similar to Tatama, which used to be used by people who were both deaf and blind to; the speaker would speak normally (in English), and the "listener" would feel what the person was saying with fingers on the side of the person's face and in front of the person's mouth.
Now I can't mouth obscenities about the person I'm talking with without them hearing!!! You can't also hold a "quiet" conversation with the person beside you while "politely" listening to the person on the phone...
Oh well... my boss probably needs to know about what I call him behind his back anyways. q:]
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.