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.

Comments

I doubt this will ever work...

[TheNecromancer]

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.

Re:I doubt this will ever work...

[Linux Ate My Dog!]

If the box gave feedback, people would very quickly compenstate to insert subtelty back and modulate the output just like they want to have it. The speech system is amazing that way, as you prove every time you manage to stay completly intelligible when speaking while chewing.

When I once asked a linguist friend about this on an unrelated topic, he leaned over the table and put his thumb and index finger on the outer corners of my lower lip, and then pinched them together to immobilize it. "Speak," he said. It was wierd but I sounded near normal in less than three words.

We adapt.

My first thought

[mcc]

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?

mouth movement + sound?

[jat2]

The article seemed to imply that the technology would only use mouth movements, thus allowing the phone to ignore all sound, a lot of which is noise. Of course, as CmdrTaco points out, this could lead to a loss in some of the subtleties of communication.

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.