Talk without talking

Here’s a neat little device that might come in handy. It’s a speech recognition device that doesn’t rely on actual sounds, like normal speech recognition, but rather recognising muscular patterns of speech.

“Subvocal speech recognition is basically the understanding of words without the requirement for sound,” said Chuck Jorgensen, a scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, whose team is developing the system.

“We’re looking at the neuromuscular patterns being sent through the nervous system and inferring from those patterns what words would have been said out loud had a person actually permitted himself to produce the acoustics.”

Go read the whole article here: “Silent” Speech Device May Aid Divers, Firefighters, Cell Phone Users