Technology for mobiles could soon mean the end to having to listen to other people’s chatter on your morning commute, or being disturbed by phone conversations in restaurants.
The Kralsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has developed ‘silent sounds’, a technology which has the potential to translate users’ lip movements into a computer-generated voice for the person on the receiving end of the call. The exciting new technology, which currently has a 99 per cent success rate, was unveiled at the CeBIT fair and also has a host of uses for Australian workplaces too. If a colleague loses their voice due to illness they’ll still be able to call in sick, confidential information can be transmitted safely without anyone having to utter a sound and the technology could even make doing business abroad a breeze. The technology works by detecting tiny muscular movements that happen when we speak and then turning them into electrical pulses which are converted into speech. Because the electrical pulses are universal the lip movements could be turned into words in a different language.
