Neckband turns thoughts into words

The future is now. A company called Ambient has created a product called the Audeo that can make voice communication without any voice. What, you may ask, but that doesn't make sense? Bear with me for a moment; this is some pretty cool tech.

Here's how it works. When you think of words your vocal cords still move as if you were speaking - even if no sound is made. The Audeo is a neck collar that reads vocal cord movement and transmits a digital voice to say whatever it reads from the vocal cords. So if you're on a busy train and get a phone call, you could have a Bluetooth headset to hear the conversation and an Audeo collar to speak. No one else on the train would ever need to hear your conversation.

Currently the Audeo recognizes 150 words and there is a sizeable delay between when the words are thought and when they are recognized and transmitted (see video). But these are difficulties similar to early voice recognition technologies and the time delay is sure to shrink over time.

According to New Scientist, later this year a version of the device will be released to the public that can detect individual phonemes instead of full words.

This version will be slower to process words because it will detect sounds and then piece together words based on those sounds, but it will not have the 150 word vocabulary limit of the current version.

Makers of the Audeo will target people who - due to neurological diseases like ALS - have lost the ability to speak. As a quote from the Audeo website aptly put it: "The 'Audeo' will give me the thing I need more than anything else; the ability to talk to my children."

And now, thanks to this awesome new technology, that can finally happen.