Speech

In a peer-reviewed paper recently published in Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, researchers bring together testable claims from a number of different fields to argue that the conditions surrounding an evening fire shaped the evolution of spoken language.

Can you imagine walking into an open-plan office on a busy weekday, seeing people at their desks – and hearing practically nothing? Like not even the staccato rhythm of fingers on a keyboard? That might be where AI-powered technologies lead us.

A wearable collar from researchers in South Korea can hear the words you never say out loud and play them back in your own voice. Built for laryngectomy patients and noisy industrial environments, it works where microphones can't.

A stroke can make it difficult to speak fluently, clearly, or in full sentences. Scientists have been working to change this, by developing a wearable device called Revoice. It helps people who lack the power of speech to communicate more naturally.

The Index 01 ring – from the makers of the Pebble smartwatch – captures your ideas as you speak into it. It's meant to act as external memory for your brain, while lasting for years on a single-use battery that doesn't need recharging.

Getting out of earshot to make a private call just got a lot harder. Researchers have shown the vibrations of the earpiece inside your phone can be picked up by a radar sensor from a distance, converted into audio, and transcribed using AI.

In a crowd, background noise can make it hard to hear people talking. But soon we could be wearing headphones that use AI to filter out noise that’s more than a few feet away, creating a “sound bubble” that lets you focus on your own conversation.

Noisy environments pose a challenge to deaf people, particularly when they're trying to discern what a specific person within such a setting is saying. AirCaps glasses are designed to help, by providing real-time captioning to the wearer.

There could soon be a powerful new aid for people who are unable to speak. British scientists have developed a choker that detects its wearer's silently mouthed words, and converts them into audible synthetic speech.

Scientists have grown a tiny brain-like organoid out of human stem cells, hooked it up to a computer, and demonstrated its potential as a kind of organic machine learning chip, showing it can quickly pick up speech recognition and math predictions.

Some people lack the power of speech, while others may find themselves in noisy settings where speaking voice commands out loud just won't work. Such folks might have use for the EchoSpeech glasses, which read their user's silently spoken words.

While some assistance is available to individuals who lack the power of speech, verbally communicating with other people can still be challenging. A new face-worn strain sensor could help, as it's able to "read" the wearer's silently mouthed words.