Speech without Moving your Lips

A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals was recently demonstrated at a recent conference held by Texas Instruments. With careful training a can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. Through the neckband the words are translated through an electronic voice.

You can watch " this demonstration with a cell phone call. The demonstration wasn’t that awe inspiring but the technology has a lot of promise. There was a big delay from the thoughts of the person using the device to the voice being heard on the other end of a cell phone. The guy looked like he was staring at the person with the cell phone in a inappropriate manner. The applications of this technology are certainly intriguing to say the least.

The first application should definitely be for people that aren’t able to speak for whatever reason but I wouldn’t be surprised if the military creates an application for this technology before anyone. The mentioned in the demonstration how great would it be if you could talk to someone on your cell phone without the person next to you hearing what you’re saying. I am sure train commuters would love that.

The first thing to pop into my head was the abusive applications of this technology. I was wondering if this technology could steal people’s thoughts but apparently you have to send your thoughts to your vocal chords in order for it to work. Although, I wouldn’t be surprised if that technology showed up in the near future. There actually is one technology that I would be interested to see and that is being able to record your thoughts from dreams or even record video of what you see in dreams, which would be awesome. There is definitely potential for major abuse with that technology though.

This new technology is quite amazing though and there will probably be applications for this that most people haven’t even thought of yet. The demonstration of the technology wasn’t that amazing but they claim the technology is further along then the application they demonstrated with the cell phone.