Non-acoustic sensors detect speech without sound

[Dover]

Non-acoustic sensors detect speech without sound

10:30 09 April 2005

Just think how eerie it would be, yet also how peaceful - people all around having conversations on their mobile phones, but without uttering a sound.

Thanks to some military research, this social nirvana just might come true. DARPA, the US Department of Defense's research agency, is working on a project known as Advanced Speech Encoding, aimed at replacing microphones with non-acoustic sensors that detect speech via the speaker's nerve and muscle activity, rather than sound itself.

One system, being developed for DARPA by Rick Brown of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, relies on a sensor worn around the neck called a tuned electromagnetic resonator collar (TERC). Using sensing techniques developed for magnetic resonance imaging, the collar detects changes in capacitance caused by movement of the vocal cords, and is designed to allow speech to be heard above loud background noise.

DARPA is also pursuing an approach first developed at NASA's Ames lab, which involves placing electrodes called electromyographic sensors on the neck, to detect changes in impedance during speech. A neural network processes the data and identifies the pattern of words. The sensor can even detect subvocal or silent speech. The speech pattern is sent to a computerised voice generator that recreates the speaker's words...cont'd

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7247

[Spinzonner]

1. And conversly

we could develop things that generate human sound without comprehensible speech and name them after Shrub.

[Igel]

3. Eh. We already have the chomskybot and

text-to-speech processors.

I guess the difference is that the chomskybot produces strings that sound meaningful, but aren't.

[whistle]

2. In otherwords, by talking to ourselves without vocalizing......

...that would be cool. I've been doing that all of my life and have always thought I was nuts! Now it's considered a potential WMD.