Ever since I read Neuromancer (or was it Hardwired?), I wanted to get a subvocal speech recognition system (via Boing-Boing).

Just the other day, I was talking about this technology with a friend as we were discussing cellphones: if subvocal systems existed, people would look a lot less dumb talking to cell’s headsets. Moreover, this would make cellphone a lot less peace-disruptive. Obviously, such an advance wouldn’t fare well with posers who insist on being loud while talking to whomever they’re talking to on their cell!

The technology could improve the adoption rate of speech recognition systems as well. As mentioned in the article, since the speech recognition is done over “silent signals”, noise, traditionally a significant problem for Speech-To-Text (STT) systems, wouldn’t be such a big factor anymore when it comes to speech recognition accuracy: we could see huge improvements on this aspect with such a technology, driving adoption. This could tremendously improve the life of handicapped people. Moreover, subvocalization, apart from reducing the number of loud cellphone users, would also make it more socially acceptable to “talk” to your computer, which has also been seen as an obstacle to STT system adoption: people tend to feel embarrassed while trying to get their computer to understand what they’re saying in front of coworkers for example.

MacDevCenter has a detailed article on Speech recognition and synthesis in Mac OS. They have a short paragraph on why human-computer interaction via the speech medium isn’t more successful but they fail to mention that without subvocalization, it’s fairly difficult to interact with your computer by talking to it when you’re not the only person in the room…

I also wonder if the technology would help people with speech disabilities. I don’t think that this would do any good to people who were born mute since they probably don’t know how to subvocalize (but I don’t really know anything about that so…). If STT accuracy is near perfect, then you could think of coupling the STT system to a Text-To-Speech (TTS) system performing synthesis of subvocal words thus giving back the gift of speech to those who lost it. Will this work with people with speech defects? I don’t know but I think the system has lots of potential.

Obviously, the technology is still very much in its infancy but, according to NASA (the developer of the technology):

the team plans to build a dictionary of English words recognizable by speech recognition software.

Next, we need speaker implants which would be the counterpart to subvocal technology: a speaker system that would vibrate jaw bones or maybe eardrums directly to allow you to listen to things in perfect confidentiality!

Hmm, actually, no need for implants: there are already phones that let you hear the conversation via bone conduction! Living in the future today!

David Pescovitz in the Feature has a good article on the subvocalization technology and its potential.

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