Phone Call Without Speaking

Until a machine will read your thoughts, a first step has been made: New Scientists signals the development of a neckband that decodes your nerve signals into speech. For the first time, you could make a phone call without opening your mouth.

A trained individual can transmit motor messages to its vocal cords without emitting a sound. But the nerve signals can be detected by the neckband which sends them via radio waves to a computer that decodes them and a computerized voice speaks them to the listener.

The new invention has been presented to the public at a recent conference of the microchip manufacturer Texas Instruments. The device is called Audeo and it is the work of Michael Callahan, co-founder of Ambient Corporation. Still, by the moment, the gear cannot give voice to our hidden thoughts.

"Producing signals for the Audeo to decipher requires 'a level above thinking'. Users must think specifically about voicing words for them to be picked up by the equipment," Callahan told New Scientist.

The Audeo can do even more: it was proved that it can enable people to control wheelchairs by the "power" of their thoughts.

"I can still talk verbally at the same time. We can differentiate between when you want to talk silently, and when you want to talk out loud. That could be useful in certain situations, for example when making a private call while out in public. The system demonstrated at the TI conference can recognize only a limited set of about 150 words and phrases. This resembles the early days of speech recognition software," Callahan told New Scientist.

But before 2009, an uploaded Ambient could go beyond the vocabulary limit. The device would not decode words or phrases, but phonemes. Speed would be sacrificed, as users will have to make words by mentally "pronouncing" one phoneme at a time, but this would give them a total freedom of speech.

At the beginning, this device would be caprice for most of us, but for people who lost speech ability because of neurological issues or other causes, this would bring their life closer to normality.