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Silent speech with ultrasound

alephneuro.com

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Re: Silent speech with ultrasound

#21

Post by albert_e »

This sounds promising -- would love to see this become more practical.

With wearable devices becoming more common - I am anticipating a wave of "sensors" that can be as simple as small band-aid patches that wirelessly send data to your smart device. Those sensors could also open up human-coputer-interface innovations like these.

---

In similar space ...

There was a post about a thought-to-text project from MIT no less --

"AlterEgo"

10 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45174125 8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16780357

When I saw the demo posted last year it left me with an uneasy feeling -- gut feel said it was more marketing than a real working technology demo. Nothing seems to have come out of that lab since then -- strengthemning my suspicions.

Re: Silent speech with ultrasound

#22

Post by thomascountz »

thomascountz wrote: post #17

The use of ultrasound is interesting! The first step (identifying speech) is called subvocalization recognition, and early research (Chuck Jorgensen, et. al (2023) from NASA) use EMG[1]. [1]: https://scispace.com/pdf/sub-auditory-speech-recognition-bas...

s/2023/2003/

Re: Silent speech with ultrasound

#23

Post by fatuna »

I remember reading about something like this tech in one of Asimov's Robot novels. Thought about trying to build something like this, but don't really have the skills. Awesome they did build this! I guess if they make it easy to train on your speech (just combine it with speech to text), it's a product waiting to happen!

Re: Silent speech with ultrasound

#25

Post by jimbo_joe »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #24

I'm having trouble imagining how one would use this. How do you speak without making sounds?

You move your mouth and tongue as if you are gonna make the sounds, just don't exhale the air. They have a demonstration video in the blog post. As somebody else have already pointed out, it's a great tool for interacting with always-on camera devices like smart assistants, makes it a bit less weird.

Re: Silent speech with ultrasound

#27

Post by mikeodds »

didntknowyou wrote: post #26

there is a perception that ultrasound is not as dangerous as xrays (radiation etc). As we find more use-cases for it we need to be aware that the damage caused by blasting organs with energy waves is not negligible.

is this true for medical use cases where it’s primarily for imaging? i.e. echocardiogram or pregnancy scans

Re: Silent speech with ultrasound

#28

Post by vadimsc »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #4

I wonder if, like with lip reading, they switch from American English to a different language that's not so peculiar they would have and much less error rate

Tongue movement detection cannot track only six phonemes: - b - p - m - f - v - h

That’s a remarkably small number compared with other methods. English could easily be optimized to achieve a sub-5% WER with a very small model.

Re: Silent speech with ultrasound

#29

Post by vadimsc »

mike_hock wrote: post #16

I find it annoying to try and talk completely silently. I'm always whispering at least a bit. I can't imagine doing this for the entirety of a call.

When I was collecting data, I spoke silently for more than two hours.

After the session, I tried to use Wispr Flow but forgot that I was still speaking silently, so it didn’t work.

When I finally said it out loud, it felt like such a hassle that I essentially sold myself on the idea of silent speech.

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