(MIT Media Lab)

MIT Researchers Have Created a Bizarre Headset That Lets You Communicate Without Speaking

5 APRIL 2018

MIT researchers have invented a new computer interface that's totally hands-free and voice-free, but it doesn't read your brain waves either. Instead it relies on something called subvocalisation, or silent speech - the name for what you're doing when you say words in your head.


It's called AlterEgo, and it consists of a wearable headset that wraps around the wearer's ear and jaw, and a computing system that processes the data picked up by the headset to process and translate data received by the headset, and output a response.

"The motivation for this was to build an IA device - an intelligence-augmentation device," said lead researcher Arnav Kapur, from the MIT Media Lab.


The system works a bit like a myoelectric prosthetic.






The AlterEgo headset consists of electrode sensors that sit on the regions of the wearer's face and jaw where those signals are strongest and most reliable, as determined by Kapur's team.

It also includes a pair of bone-conduction headphones that wrap around the outside of the wearer's ears.


Combined, the sensors allow the wearer to silently "speak" to the computer by thinking words, and the computer to speak back via the headphones - like a Google or Siri you can talk to without having to say "OK Google" or "Hey Siri" in a crowded street.

It still requires calibration for every individual user.

This is because every wearer's neuromuscular signals will be slightly different, so the system would have to learn each user's "accent".








Its translation rate was 92 percent accurate - which, Kapur said, would likely improve with regular use.

The team is currently collecting data on more complex conversations to try and expand AlterEgo's capabilities.


If they do, the implications will be huge - especially if they can achieve human-to-human communications.

This would be useful in noisy environments, or environments where silence is required - but it could also allow the voiceless to communicate, assuming they still had use of the muscles in their jaw and face.

The team presented their paper at the Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Intelligent User Interface that was held in Japan on March 7-11. It can be read in full online here.