When I first found out about this, I thought it was some sort of joke – But apparently it isn’t. Researchers have found a way to lip-read which could be implemented into mobile phones in the future. What this means is that you could have a phone conversation with someone, as normal, but without making any sound at all!

Let’s take a look at some of the science behind it. Basically, the technology measures small electrical signals which are produced by the muscles during speech. It can then work out what the person was trying to say, even if it couldn’t be heard through a normal phone conversation, and then produce a synthesised version of it. This new technology was announced in a German electronics fair earlier on this week, Cebit.

One of the main people behind it, Professor Tanja Shultz, said that the inspiration behind this was that she was fed up with people chatting on their mobile phones on the trains, which I suppose is a good point. Most people will have come across this at some point in time.

Of course this is only in the testing stage so far and isn’t ready for the mass market. Currently, to use this technology, nine electrodes need to stuck to the user’s face. Not the nicest thing to do, really. But Processor Tanja Shultz did say that in future it could be implented into mobile phones without needing these electrodes.

Other ideas that were mentioned was that a person who had lost their voice could use it to talk to people or this technology could even provide instant language translation, where a user first lip-talks into the phone, the message is translated and then played back to the other person. In the future, this could be built further and further to something truly amazing. We just have to wait to see what happens with it.

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