Show HN: Subvocal – Talk to your computer without making noise (self)
309 pointsby aarushyadav3 hours ago|208 comments
Hi HN, we're Aarush and Arnav from The Subvocal Company (YC F26) (https://subvocal.company/). We’re building smart glasses that let you talk to your computer without talking out loud. You can mouth words silently and discreetly and the glasses decode them to text at the speed of speech.
(Edit: you don't actually have to move your lips or even open your mouth for this to work! Since the RF can see inside your mouth the system can be fine tuned on "internal speech". This isn't the automatic tongue movements that occur when "thinking" words to yourself, but more like mouthing with your lips closed. It's a bit weird to do, but with practice, we have been able to get it down pretty well.)
Arnav and I were studying CS at Georgia Tech at the beginning of the year, with no experience in silent speech or sensing. We were both AI-native builders and power users of Wispr Flow. What bugged us was not being able to use these tools in the library (or an office) or in public. At Stanford’s TreeHacks in February, we decided to build the most technically ridiculous thing we could think of. We’d read about AlterEgo, a silent speech system out of MIT’s Media Lab, and wanted to recreate it in 36 hours. We built a crude prototype, sticking EMG electrodes onto my face:
We got it to kind of work at a letter level in a very janky way. It wasn’t good enough to win the hackathon, but convinced us to go all in. The first time I typed a sentence without anyone noticing, I felt the magic of the technology.
We quickly realized EMG (reading muscle electrical signals) wouldn’t work:
- Signal changes due to sweat
- Electrical interference
- Placement variability
- Most importantly, no one wants to stick electrodes onto their face!!
So we switched to RF and built the glasses you see now. They emit radio waves, similar to Bluetooth, that pass through your face. As they cross the tongue, lips and soft palate, they’re modulated by silent mouthing. We train foundation models on this data to decode these perturbations to text.
Despite prior academic research, getting this to work was a huge engineering challenge. First we built an extremely low noise RF sensing stack. Then we had to place antennas so their fields overlapped maximally with the articulators. Our first attempt on glasses failed completely, so we reverted to old habits and taped antennas on our face:
This worked, but obviously wasn’t a product yet. So we worked deep in simulations to design glasses that could hold the antennas.
That evolved into our design now, with antennas embedded within the frames. Once we established there was a signal, the next hurdle was cross-user generalization. Everyone’s facial anatomy, and hence RF signal patterns, are vastly different. We tried algorithmic workarounds but realized the only lever was to massively scale pretraining data.
So that’s what we did. We set up booths in our office and paid people to read prompts wearing our glasses, to pretrain our models on. This produced a beautiful scaling curve, with errors falling quickly as we scaled our dataset and cross-user performance becoming genuinely compelling (as you see in the video above; Dave only had a short 20-sentence calibration).
We always heard about building things from first principles but never understood it before this. We tried tackling it top down but completely failed. Only when we broke each component (the antenna, electronics, ML) down to its fundamentals to understand and optimize it did we get it to work really well.
Over the next few months we’re continuing R&D to turn our prototype glasses into the slick product on our website and ship in Q1 2027. We’re also scaling up our dataset to improve performance on edge cases.
For anyone who loves voice dictation but hates using it around people, we’ve opened preorders for our first batch of 500 units, with a $200 discount off the final price. Allocation is running out quickly, so get yours at https://subvocal.co/preorder!
vessenes 2 hours ago
Just preordered -- glasses request: there's no way to say it nicely, I have a big nose. With a high bridge. Many glasses are really tough to get properly placed; may I request you not give up on the pads w/metal adjusters that you have in the product photos? Don't let a designer take them away from you, us folks not one standard deviation from 'normal' noses will thank you.
Second, how tough is this signal processing? Will it be done on-glasses, or through an app? Third, what's the equivalent of a wake word for these? I'm reminded of the Apple Vision Pro radar to see if your fingers are clicking. I could imagine a lot of modalities where I want to just start talking and have things happen, and a lot where I don't want the glasses to pick it up. Fourth, I think a cool voice change demo would be rad -- not sure what latency is like, but if you could get it end to end under like 250ms you could probably have someone exaggerate the mouth movements and pipe out audio of them talking like someone else. Which would be another really cool demo.
Super cool. You're going to be working 80 hour weeks for the next year, I'm excited to see what you put out!
aarushyadav an hour ago
Yep, we have been quite set on nose pads to keep them comfortable. I will keep you updated with the designs!
The decoding is done via a companion app on your laptop or phone in the cloud, but end to end latency is still quite fast, under 500ms usually.
To begin with we don't plan to have a wake word, but rather a trigger key on your connected device that you're entering text into (pressing Alt for example), similar to Wispr Flow. We're doing some R&D into the silent speech equivalent of voice activity detection, so we have a low power basic RF detection always-on, not enough to decode speech from but enough to detect rough movement, and when it detects speech-like activity beginning to start we can trigger full sensing within tens of ms. This would likely ship as a software update a few months after shipping, though.
The voice change demo is something I've thought about actually, but we never got around to doing. Might film it soon :)
vessenes an hour ago
Super cool. For a cool voice change demo we'll allow a gb200 over low latency wifi :) elevenlabs has deals with a number of professional actors and voice actors for licensed uses, seems like you could probably find an ethical and cool co-brand opportunity in there.
Have fun building this! It's worth doing.
mrandish 6 minutes ago
> "you don't actually have to move your lips or even open your mouth for this to work ... It's a bit weird to do"
In the video Dave just finished the training mode and is silently moving his lips, which seems pretty natural to me. I just spent a minute trying to do 'internal speech' (as many elements of speech as possible with lips closed). It does feel weird and seems like internal speech is probably providing a fair bit less signal for the system to sense (in both signal freq and amplitude). I realized I can't guess at how much articulation is 'enough' without feedback.
Based on that I'm guessing adapting to internal speech might follow a bit different path than silent speech, which seems more like 'just do what you already do silently'. Extrapolating, I expect training internal speech might involve more real-time feedback to help the user find the right degree and kind of articulation.
I realize you're still in the prototype phase but I assume an increasing number of people are getting multiple longer sessions. Do new users advance from silent to internal speech quickly and stay there? I'd be surprised as, intuitively, 'Silent -> Internal' seems like a bigger step than 'Normal -> Silent'.
Separately, if I was using it daily, I can imagine wanting to evolve a kind of micro-expression shorthand for 'Yes', 'No', 'Pause' and 'Stop', since two humans naturally evolve similar non-verbal queues over time. Vocalizing words is flexible and expressive but not efficient. It would seem odd if an intelligent, adaptive 'invisible friend' living on my face for years didn't adapt to me and me to it. Are you guys thinking in those directions for the future?
postscape 4 minutes ago
I remember seeing AlterEgo a few years ago and thinking it was so cool (obviously was missing voice agents to make it really cook)
Was just thinking this could be applicable for people with some disabilities tied to an actual voice agent and speaker. Or even in foreign countries where you talk and respond in the foreign language instead of waiting for an additional translation layer.
d1sxeyes an hour ago
One thing you might consider is actually telling people what it is on the homepage. Took me a fair bit of work to understand that this is effectively a pair of smart glasses.
Maybe I could have figured that out from the video but for folks who can’t watch the video it’s quite hard to discover what you’re building.
ciaranmca an hour ago
100%, I didn’t watch video or hit reserve button so didn’t realise this was a pair of glasses until I read the text on the HN post
joshdavham an hour ago
+1 to this
SkyPuncher 24 minutes ago
Based on my understanding of the technology, this also means you can effectively dictate in loud environments. Correct?
I find that I need this most often when I'm doing yard work, running equipment, or cleaning out the garage. Audio based microphones pick up so much noise.
sourpanda 2 hours ago
I think this is incredibly cool and straight out of a sci-fi novel! I think this is phenomenal for accessibility and for hands-free computing in general. I also agree with other comments that the website should have more detail on how it works, such as what you included in the post body. Amazing work guys!
themanmaran 2 hours ago
Yea in one of the further Ender's Game novels they talk about this tech a lot for characters silently mumbling to the AI.
joshgachnang 2 hours ago
Ahhhh exactly! I've wanted this since I was a kid and read those books.
spiderice 44 minutes ago
CMD+F Ender
That's exactly where my mind went. Something I've wanted ever since I read that book a couple decades ago.
ElijahLynn 2 hours ago
I second that. I've been talking and talking to my phone and AI even more and more since it keeps getting better and is generally pretty accurate these days. And there are times when I end up typing because of environmental reasons.
This is just really groundbreaking and I know the research has been out there for a little while but to actually implement is a whole nother ball game.
I think the use cases for this will expand as the product ships and gets out there!
_jholland 2 hours ago
Agree, incredibly cool, and I could definitely see myself using one, but it does give off slightly dystopian vibes, making me think of the speakwrite in 1984:
"In the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into speakwrites, there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name"
growt 2 hours ago
If the tech is mostly in the glasses temples, I would prefer to have something that attaches to my existing glasses. I have prescription glasses and a big head, tried the Even G2 smart glasses and the available frames set just too small for me
desireco42 an hour ago
What you said 100%, we are brainiacs overhere so our CPU is large
chfritz 26 minutes ago
+100 on this! My choice of glasses (and prescription) has nothing to do with my choice of how to talk to my computer. Don't risk failure just because you make them depend on each other.
The glasses will have open ear speakers similar to meta glasses! We plan to make our own agent harness and connect it native with the glasses. I have meta glasses but rarely use the AI since it's weird to talk out loud to ask it things when I'm out. This is how we want to solve it
gh5000 2 hours ago
Cue the resurgence of lip reading-based espionage. Imagining having to scan the room for people watching subvocalizers. Will subvocalizers start holding up a clipboard over their face a la NFL coaches?
80fj0348i 2 hours ago
That's already been a problem ever since people figured out you can recover voice from watching the subpixel vibration of objects within a room. (Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUzB0L0mSCI)
Thought of the same! Cue George Orwell facepalming in his grave.
0x4e 2 hours ago
For the ones thinking this is great, have you actually tried to talk without making sounds?
I don't think it is an intuitive action at all and I became self-conscious about not making a sound rather than talking like I normally would.
I suppose it would require some "getting used to."
Regardless, I think it is a cool idea and a real problem. Sometimes I don't want to type nor talk out loud so I find myself whispering at my phone like I'm telling it a dirty secret.
--
As I'm writing this, I think this kind of product might not hit the market for consumers, but I'm seeing this used by Flock like companies to spy on people's speech, so kudos on making machine lip reading a thing!
sudb 34 minutes ago
There's already open-source stuff [1][2] out there that can lipread video to transcribe text, but the word error rate is pretty high (and it may not be physically possible to get this down without doing something like subvocal and having other sensors near your face).
Have you never talked / mouthed without making sounds? Never even as a kid when something made you mad and you paced around the room think-saying shower thoughts to get back at that person? Even as an adult I probably mouth a sentence or two e.g. "What the fuck is this" when looking at AI output 3-5 times a week
It does feel a little weird to do it voluntarily when not emotional, but that'll be solved as soon as Claude fucks something up :)
avree 2 hours ago
Do most people talk faster than they can type? It's the opposite for me - I also read aloud slower than I can read in my head.
aarushyadav 2 hours ago
Most people type at 40-50 WPM. Developers can often type at 70-100 WPM. Meanwhile, most people can talk at 120-200 WPM. Beyond just speed, we've found with many people that talking things out tends to flow more naturally, since it's often a lower friction action so people don't "sanitize" the text in their head before outputting it. Leads to better prompts quite often :)
achandra03 2 hours ago
> talking things out tends to flow more naturally,
I've found the opposite. Typing feels much more "deliberate", and of course you can hit backspace but you can't un-speak a word. With prompting, I've found that, in general, speaking leads to lower-quality results than typing.
cogythea 2 hours ago
The bit before your quote was
> with many people
Not everyone. I, at least, definitely overthink what I type, and while I end up with nice-ish sentences in my prompts it takes a lot longer than a train of thought that the AI parses correctly most of the time anyway.
achandra03 23 minutes ago
Yes, of course I wasn't trying to speak for everyone. Just my personal experience :)
walthamstow an hour ago
I was surprised to find after using dictation heavily all year that I actually talk a load of rubbish when I'm speaking, using all kinds of cliches and fillers and saying way more than was needed.
dr_hooo an hour ago
Same experience. Faster, but also much more filler.
achandra03 24 minutes ago
Yes, I feel very similar. Maybe it's just that my verbal intelligence is lower than average but it feels that the signal to noise ratio is much lower when I speak off the cuff vs when I type.
chicagobuss 2 hours ago
When I try talking for prompting my coding agents, I'm always severely disappointed with the specificity of the prompt. It's just much easier for me to "talk about" coding specifics with a keyboard than it is for me to speak about them, for some reason.
I suspect this has to do with the nature of the work you're doing; I dunno, just count me firmly in the camp of people who only rarely feel like I can express a thought sufficiently for coding agents with their voice.
LorenPechtel 2 hours ago
Yeah, we have a lot of experience with typing while our eyes and mind are occupied elsewhere. But I've noticed the years have slowed my typing.
briandw 2 hours ago
I'm dyslexic and while I can type fairly quickly it's always a struggle to get the spelling and typing mistakes fixed. Talking is a much more natural way to express myself. The frustration of not being able to spell the word that I want doesn't exist. Mis-transcription errors are of course an issue, but those are getting fewer and fewer.
kqp 2 hours ago
Also, speech is probably bottlenecked by speed of thought, not making the sounds. I recall some study showing that data rate is pretty consistent between languages, despite wpm varying significantly due to language verbosity. You can try it yourself: try to quickly repeat “one two three four five” then try to read a paragraph out loud as quickly as you can, I bet you can feel the first strain your muscles and the second your brain, and I bet the first blows your typing wpm out of the water.
heurist an hour ago
Hard to paste in 2k words of context when you're talking. I don't think voice is the solution for most people who need to communicate heavily with AI.
1shooner 24 minutes ago
But what you're calling 'talking things out' I consider to be forming thoughts. I want to do that myself upstream of the LLM. I don't want to pay per token for my half-baked stream of consciousness.
xbar 2 hours ago
Most people talk faster than they can type. 80 wpm voice chat is easy for everyone. 80 wpm typing filters out most typists.
mrngld 2 hours ago
This has been an interesting thing for me to watch as it's such a case of people having widely different experiences. I'm sure people that didn't grow up on a keyboard like me can probably talk quicker than they type, but even aside from me being a fairly good typist my speech is held up by being a bit more halting, a bit more of backtracking on word choice, sometimes not quite the same 'voice' of writing as I'm aiming for, all of which obliterates any speed advantage it'd have for me.
But happy to see people get more options.
This reminds me of Eternity's End by Jeffrey Carver and the implants they had. Released in 2000 but the more time goes on the more the neural implant technology is coming about. To be fair I think Enders Game had similar tech to detect subvocal speech like this product.
1dom 2 hours ago
> This has been an interesting thing for me to watch as it's such a case of people having widely different experiences.
Same. I'm often told I talk too fast, but I feel I communicate slowly because a lot of my fast speech involves halting and backtracking and such.
I can easily type 100WPM+, but I trivially blast out a few paragraphs of perfectly adequate text in a few seconds and then spend a few minutes re-editing it.
lstodd 2 hours ago
Writing also filters the useless crap that is spoken but is not worth writing down.
Zambyte 2 hours ago
I'm not reading aloud most of the time that I'm talking.
egeozcan 2 hours ago
Yes, I'd estimate the vast majority of people speak faster they can type. Not sure about the thinking part because I usually have 20 threads going parallel in my head and can't imagine what normal thinking would be like.
sspiff 2 hours ago
I'm the same. I also can think ahead / along much better while typing. When I'm talking I'm just talking, not thinking as much.
But I guess thinking is going out of style anyway.
That said, I know a lot of people prefer talking to their computer, especially when their computer is a phone. So there is definitely a place for stuff like this.
rickydroll 2 hours ago
You need to train yourself to speak written speech. When you do that, the thought processes behind typing your words activate, and your language use changes.
jbs789 2 hours ago
How?
rickydroll 34 minutes ago
One approach is reading your and other people's written speech out loud. Pay attention to where it feels awkward; for me, that was the direction I needed to practice. A trick that I use currently to reinforce speaking written speech is using Grammarly to make corrections, which I try to internalize.
Another trick is don't correct words and letters. Say the sentence you really meant to say. It is not uncommon for me to say a thought or a concept two, three, four times in a row as I'm wrestling with what the language should be on the written page.
lstodd 2 hours ago
Why bother when old ways work _and_ there is no benefit? Or name one.
1dom 2 hours ago
As a person who often talks far too fast and incoherently, but types generally fast and legibly, I had never recognised or even considered this, but it seems helpful. Thanks.
wongarsu 2 hours ago
While sitting at the desk, I type about as fast as I talk. While unloading the dishwasher I'm a much faster talker than typer
ronyeh 2 hours ago
On my phone, I do. I still like to tap with my thumbs, but my iPhone keyboard sucks so when I need to type a lot, I’d rather dictate.
SkyPuncher 33 minutes ago
I talk faster, but beyond the speed, I find it allows me to explain things to the LLM much more naturally.
outlore 14 minutes ago
Can someone comment on the AirPods tweet making the rounds (i.e. the subvocal killer)? I am excited by Subvocal, but am wondering how much bespoke hardware is actually required?
aerhardt 13 minutes ago
I have this problem and I was wondering how it would be solved. For now I can cope because I mostly work from home but I’ll keep track of you guys. Best of luck!
collabs 2 hours ago
I am so glad to see an unpolished early look and an honest evaluation of about five percent error rate in the YouTube video. The really cool stuff will be the applications on top of `subvocal` though at least in my opinion.
So this could take "noise canceling" to a whole new level if you could somehow "speak" across a loud bar or across the world, for that matter. Being integrated into something like Signal or similar end to end encrypted platform would be interesting as well.
aarushyadav 2 hours ago
Yep, I agree. Noise cancellation is a feature we want to release at some point in the future. Using the RF to denoise a very noisy audio signal which has you speaking in it. And we'll release an SDK as well a few months after shipping to build stuff on top of it!
thisisauserid 3 hours ago
I'm more looking for the Jane from Speaker for the Dead version. In-ear device that can hear and feel the subvocalization.
40four 2 hours ago
I had to look it up, I forgot he communicated with her through sub-vocalizations. I remember the jewel earpiece, but in my head he just communicated through thoughts or something.
Good reference! That series of books Is one of my all time favorites.
frenchie4111 2 hours ago
First, this my favorite book of all time so I love seeing it shouted out
Second, I agree with exactly this. Something shaped like an AirPod
vessenes 2 hours ago
I mean we're getting pretty close here -- you could have these + your AirPods in transparency mode up and you're not far off. Also Claude won't currently ice you out for going dark, unlike Jane.
johnhamlin 2 hours ago
With so many people singing the praises of voice to text, I keep thinking about how most sci-fi futures feature subvocalization as a prerec for that kind of adoption. Always love to see sci-fi come to life!
kmoser 2 hours ago
You can have a silent conversation with someone else wearing the device? This does not bode well for casinos.
darkstar999 2 hours ago
A casino would have no problem seeing mouth movement.
stronglikedan an hour ago
> This does not bode well for casinos.
For about 15 minutes until they figure out what's going on, take those folks out back and "convince" them to spill the beans on how it work, then come up with a way to detect and prevent it moving forward.
spiderice 39 minutes ago
You've been watching too many movies. Casino's are going to risk getting shut down in 2026 to "convince" random people of anything.
willwade an hour ago
Theres a LOT of people working on this.. Cornell have been putting students on this task for about 5 years.. Lots of fun different ways of doing it. Interesting you went the radar from glasses route.. I wish you well. Yet to see a product apart from the odd lip reading ML project that makes it into a product..
MarcelOlsz an hour ago
I'm waiting for throat tape a la that one paper where whatever you say in your head translates to micro movements in your throat/jaw or something like that.
columk an hour ago
I think these have a place but I can't say the same for most other new AI communication devices. Creeper glasses, pins, watches, desktop units etc. I want to be able to speak and hear from my agents at all times but why would I want a new device when I already wear earbuds? New products are being designed to pick up low murmuring/whispering, like the Subtle earbuds, but I assume most earbuds will be designed this way in future.
PebblesRox 3 hours ago
Very cool! I was curious to hear the details of how it worked but couldn’t find them on your landing page. I’m glad to see them here and you might want to include them more prominently on the page itself. I didn’t even realize it was a pair of glasses til I read the above.
PebblesRox 3 hours ago
E.g. your FAQ says it doesn’t use cameras but does not say what it does use. And when I got to the footer and clicked the “how it works” link, it seemingly took me back to the top of the page I had just read.
theturtletalks 3 hours ago
Someone built an open-source version of this, but it’s far from polished:
I’m using these to build my own so I can work in co-working spaces, planes, and libraries. Though moving my mouth with no words might draw some eyes.
willio58 3 hours ago
> There was this really interesting one where it reads your lips
This is what I thought the original post was about. The glasses you have to wear is where that lost me.
If we could get lip-reading via your computer/phone camera down perfectly, that's the real win. Making people wear your goofy frames is where you lose a massive portion of people. Nobody wants to look like Zuckerberg lol
aarushyadav 3 hours ago
Lip reading is one of the other modalities we tried as well beyond IMU, EMG and RF! We worked a lot on fine tuning Auto-AVSR, one of the most commonly used open source lipreading models. It's very enticing to work on, since it gets to about 17% word error rate, which looks good enough that you would think working on it further would get it down to product quality, but we found there's an information-theoretic limit on the modality. Speech has 40 phonemes, but only about 12 to 15 visemes (externally visually separable phonetic states). For example P and B look very similar from a camera. This causes the scaling laws on lipreading to flatten out at an error that's too high to be product ready but just low enough to make for a good demo. Our original plan was actually to ship a lipreading software to see if people would want this behavior, but we realized you couldn't make lipreading work!
zie 2 hours ago
Any deaf/HoH person who has tried to do lipreading could have told you all of this too.
Good luck on the project!
theturtletalks 2 hours ago
Now that is insightful! The demo definitely fooled me and even the first repo requires you to train the model.
Lip reading AI would be pretty big since privacy would probably go out the window.
altcognito 2 hours ago
Why not a pencil in the ear or something you can put in a shirt pocket? Or even earbuds?
tmsh an hour ago
but can't a decision model or some other model deduce "P" or "B" based on the context (i.e., previous words said)?
reminds me of tesla fsd v. waymo. may be a market for both? i.e., camera-only or camera + specific hardware.
aarushyadav an hour ago
Not well enough! You can get to 15-20%ish WER but going beyond that doesn't seem feasible with the info available from a camera, even with a great language model
aarushyadav 3 hours ago
Yup we worked with IMUs as well when we started this. They measure aggregated face motion, so cannot distinguish between fine phonetic classes, only broad words. The open source demo got to a 5 word classifier, I believe. We tried a lot to make IMUs work too, in various form factors, but the signal doesn't contain enough information for open ended decoding beyond classifying between a few words. We would have loved to be able to just push software!
joshstrange 2 hours ago
Super excited to see more products in this area. I talk to my computer the majority of the time now, and I can do that because I work from home. If I were on public transportation or in an office, it would be much more difficult. It's been interesting to watch the Overton window, if you will, shift for people talking _to_ their phones. Now, the majority of my family will use voice to text on their phone whereas I remember just a few years ago, if not even just a year ago, it was made fun of.
tomhow 3 hours ago
I'm curious about whether this could be done with the hardware mounted on top of the laptop screen or on a stand on the desk, rather than the glasses form factor. Have you explored this?
aarushyadav 3 hours ago
Yes, we have! The same kind of RF doesn't work in that form, since it is attenuated strongly over that big of a distance. But the other interesting alternative we tried it mmWave radar, RF at about 60 GHz, the same band as 5G. This is much more similar to conventional radar, in that it would bounce off the face rather than passing through it like our current system. We found a few problems with this:
1. It faced the same issue as cameras. mmWave radar has a very low penetration in tissue, so it basically just bounced off the mouth. This only let us see visemes, which aren't enough to get to a low error rate as complete phonetic decoding can.
2. While mmWave radar can detect skin movement as small as a few microns via Doppler shift (given it's small wavelength), its spatial resolution with most systems is quite low. For example, it can tell that something moved 2 microns but within a 5cm x 5cm block. This coarse information makes it very hard to decode
That's why we weren't able to make something that can mount to your laptop. We're trying to make a necklace form factor at some point in the future though, but can't give a date on this!
dist-epoch 2 hours ago
What about something like a baseball cap instead of glasses? Or some sort of head band?
aarushyadav 2 hours ago
Exploring that too as a next product, but probably a while down the line!
Lerc 2 hours ago
How about a cap with a propellor on it that spins when receiving words :)
monkeydust 2 hours ago
One of the coolest things I have recently seen but would love some details. It also got me thinking a about this recent Neuralink post.
I would be fairly interested if this works without opening my mouth. Like, if you can nail _micro_ tongue movements, it would feel pretty close to thought.
aarushyadav 2 hours ago
It actually can! Since the RF can see inside your mouth the system doesn't inherently need lip movements and can be fine tuned on what we call "internal speech". Note that this isn't the automatic tongue movements that occur when "thinking" words to yourself, but it's rather like mouthing with your lips closed. We don't often lead with this since it's weird for many people to do, but with a bit of practice, we have been able to get it down pretty well.
dang 2 hours ago
Wow that's fascinating. I've added that bit to your text above - I hope that's ok! It answers what was emerging as a sort of mini-FAQ.
Edit: the more that I think about it the cooler and more important this feature seems!
hk__2 2 hours ago
But how would you distinguish all the sounds that don’t require any tongue movement, like (most of?) the vowels?
aarushyadav 2 hours ago
There's subtle changes in internal speech muscles as well often for those kinds of movements, and where it does seem ambiguous language context is usually enough to distinguish
jefftk an hour ago
Vowels definitely require tongue movement! Leave your mouth closed and whisper "a-e-i-o-u" and you can feel your tongue moving.
Vowels change the shape of your mouth's cavity to change which frequencies to emphasize ("formants") and we hear the differences in vowels by analyzing those formant patterns.
