Yet another Hacker News

Show HN: Subvocal – Talk to your computer without making noise

198 points aarushyadav 1 hour ago 146 comments

Hi HN, we're Aarush and Arnav from The Subvocal Company (YC F26). We’re building smart glasses that let you talk to your computer without talking out loud. You can mouth words silently and discreetly and the glasses decode them to text at the speed of speech.

Here's a video of Dave from YC trying it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QdX1eObVYI

(Edit: you don't actually have to move your lips or even open your mouth for this to work! Since the RF can see inside your mouth the system can be fine tuned on "internal speech". This isn't the automatic tongue movements that occur when "thinking" words to yourself, but more like mouthing with your lips closed. It's a bit weird to do, but with practice, we have been able to get it down pretty well.)

Arnav and I were studying CS at Georgia Tech at the beginning of the year, with no experience in silent speech or sensing. We were both AI-native builders and power users of Wispr Flow. What bugged us was not being able to use these tools in the library (or an office) or in public. At Stanford’s TreeHacks in February, we decided to build the most technically ridiculous thing we could think of. We’d read about AlterEgo, a silent speech system out of MIT’s Media Lab, and wanted to recreate it in 36 hours. We built a crude prototype, sticking EMG electrodes onto my face:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mwhv5HZMz3UTevdrgwS5O7g2jWV...

We got it to kind of work at a letter level in a very janky way. It wasn’t good enough to win the hackathon, but convinced us to go all in. The first time I typed a sentence without anyone noticing, I felt the magic of the technology.

We quickly realized EMG (reading muscle electrical signals) wouldn’t work:

- Signal changes due to sweat

- Electrical interference

- Placement variability

- Most importantly, no one wants to stick electrodes onto their face!!

So we switched to RF and built the glasses you see now. They emit radio waves, similar to Bluetooth, that pass through your face. As they cross the tongue, lips and soft palate, they’re modulated by silent mouthing. We train foundation models on this data to decode these perturbations to text.

Despite prior academic research, getting this to work was a huge engineering challenge. First we built an extremely low noise RF sensing stack. Then we had to place antennas so their fields overlapped maximally with the articulators. Our first attempt on glasses failed completely, so we reverted to old habits and taped antennas on our face:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ks0dS0eZiTV9EqSFsyB_w5BBjpc...

Since taping antennas consistently in the same spot and angle was hard, we created this weird but effective head rig to hold them in place:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rhzNFpdDzr7oHk0isFY70dkoV4C...

This worked, but obviously wasn’t a product yet. So we worked deep in simulations to design glasses that could hold the antennas.

That evolved into our design now, with antennas embedded within the frames. Once we established there was a signal, the next hurdle was cross-user generalization. Everyone’s facial anatomy, and hence RF signal patterns, are vastly different. We tried algorithmic workarounds but realized the only lever was to massively scale pretraining data.

So that’s what we did. We set up booths in our office and paid people to read prompts wearing our glasses, to pretrain our models on. This produced a beautiful scaling curve, with errors falling quickly as we scaled our dataset and cross-user performance becoming genuinely compelling (as you see in the video above; Dave only had a short 20-sentence calibration).

We always heard about building things from first principles but never understood it before this. We tried tackling it top down but completely failed. Only when we broke each component (the antenna, electronics, ML) down to its fundamentals to understand and optimize it did we get it to work really well.

Over the next few months we’re continuing R&D to turn our prototype glasses into the slick product on our website and ship in Q1 2027. We’re also scaling up our dataset to improve performance on edge cases.

For anyone who loves voice dictation but hates using it around people, we’ve opened preorders for our first batch of 500 units, with a $200 discount off the final price. Allocation is running out quickly, so get yours at https://subvocal.co/preorder!

hmokiguess 1 hour ago | parent

EDIT: I find talking in that manner in a public setup to be awkward and unpleasant, maybe that's just me.

That said, I think the idea of having a private walkie-talkie that connects on its own frequency for large crowded spaces to be very cool

dang 1 hour ago | parent

> I like it but I don't want it, I'm not sure, it feels weird and cringy.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. Especially please don't do this when a thread is brand new. Such comments are the easiest to post, and therefore the quickest to appear, but by posting them, you steer the discussion straight away from the curious, thoughtful conversation we want here. Threads are extremely sensitive to initial conditions, so this is important.

hmokiguess 1 hour ago | parent

Apologies, I edited, can you tell me if my edit is ok? EDIT: happy to delete and repost my edit instead too

dang 1 hour ago | parent

It's better. I've turned off the flag.

theturtletalks 1 hour ago | parent

Someone built an open-source version of this, but it’s far from polished:

https://github.com/joeblau/subvox

There was this really interesting one where it reads your lips:

https://github.com/amywork777/lipflow

I’m using these to build my own so I can work in co-working spaces, planes, and libraries. Though moving my mouth with no words might draw some eyes.

willio58 1 hour ago | parent

> There was this really interesting one where it reads your lips

This is what I thought the original post was about. The glasses you have to wear is where that lost me.

If we could get lip-reading via your computer/phone camera down perfectly, that's the real win. Making people wear your goofy frames is where you lose a massive portion of people. Nobody wants to look like Zuckerberg lol

aarushyadav 1 hour ago | parent

Lip reading is one of the other modalities we tried as well beyond IMU, EMG and RF! We worked a lot on fine tuning Auto-AVSR, one of the most commonly used open source lipreading models. It's very enticing to work on, since it gets to about 17% word error rate, which looks good enough that you would think working on it further would get it down to product quality, but we found there's an information-theoretic limit on the modality. Speech has 40 phonemes, but only about 12 to 15 visemes (externally visually separable phonetic states). For example P and B look very similar from a camera. This causes the scaling laws on lipreading to flatten out at an error that's too high to be product ready but just low enough to make for a good demo. Our original plan was actually to ship a lipreading software to see if people would want this behavior, but we realized you couldn't make lipreading work!

zie 53 minutes ago | parent

Any deaf/HoH person who has tried to do lipreading could have told you all of this too.

Good luck on the project!

theturtletalks 42 minutes ago | parent

Now that is insightful! The demo definitely fooled me and even the first repo requires you to train the model.

Lip reading AI would be pretty big since privacy would probably go out the window.

altcognito 16 minutes ago | parent

Why not a pencil in the ear or something you can put in a shirt pocket? Or even earbuds?

aarushyadav 1 hour ago | parent

Yup we worked with IMUs as well when we started this. They measure aggregated face motion, so cannot distinguish between fine phonetic classes, only broad words. The open source demo got to a 5 word classifier, I believe. We tried a lot to make IMUs work too, in various form factors, but the signal doesn't contain enough information for open ended decoding beyond classifying between a few words. We would have loved to be able to just push software!

s3graham 1 hour ago | parent

Neat! I don't like talking to my computer (audibly or not), but that's a cool demo.

I wonder if we could eventually end up with a "throat muscle" version where people learn to talk a new way without having to move the visible mouth muscles too.

mcbishop 1 hour ago | parent

I've thought about learning sign language in order to communicate with the computer in a not-super-annoying way. Your solution... much more realistic. Cheers.

melvinmelih 1 hour ago | parent

Great idea, if only we could use our hands and fingers to input information into the computer

paisawalla 1 hour ago | parent

How have the glasses been received? I don't understand why they're required, is it only to have a consistent mount point for the radar sensor, relative to the face? Have you thought about a throat mic?

kennywinker 56 minutes ago | parent

It looked like there was a throat mic in the first shot... it seems counterintuitive that you'd get better performance out of lidar on face muscles than on a throat mic.

aarushyadav 31 minutes ago | parent

No throat mic, the first image uses EMG (muscle electrical signal) sensors. A throat mic only works if you're still actually whispering (not fully silent) and is also a weird form factor for a consumer device, which is why we didn't go with it!

fowlie 1 hour ago | parent

Talk about over engineering a problem! If typing speed is an issue guess what, humans can train themselves to type really fast on a keyboard.

waltbosz 1 hour ago | parent

I think the problem to solve here is repetitive stress injury caused by typing

bronxpockfabz 59 minutes ago | parent

In this case, I think the problem to solve is ergonomic issues with the keyboards used for typing

rootusrootus 53 minutes ago | parent

They are claiming 200+ wpm on a prototype. Half that speed would put you in the top tier of typists, and the number of people that get anywhere close to 200 is vanishingly small.

hk__2 44 minutes ago | parent

It depends on what you’re typing. If you’re coding, it’s probably faster to type `{}[]();|` or 2,450,712 than to say it.

assumed_throwaw 15 minutes ago | parent

I have some news for you about typing code by hand...

thisisauserid 1 hour ago | parent

I'm more looking for the Jane from Speaker for the Dead version. In-ear device that can hear and feel the subvocalization.

40four 29 minutes ago | parent

I had to look it up, I forgot he communicated with her through sub-vocalizations. I remember the jewel earpiece, but in my head he just communicated through thoughts or something.

Good reference! That series of books Is one of my all time favorites.

frenchie4111 26 minutes ago | parent

First, this my favorite book of all time so I love seeing it shouted out

Second, I agree with exactly this. Something shaped like an AirPod

PebblesRox 1 hour ago | parent

Very cool! I was curious to hear the details of how it worked but couldn’t find them on your landing page. I’m glad to see them here and you might want to include them more prominently on the page itself. I didn’t even realize it was a pair of glasses til I read the above.

PebblesRox 1 hour ago | parent

E.g. your FAQ says it doesn’t use cameras but does not say what it does use. And when I got to the footer and clicked the “how it works” link, it seemingly took me back to the top of the page I had just read.

OhMeadhbh 1 hour ago | parent

Spent 30 seconds scrolling down to try to figure out what this is. Eventually clicked away from the site because it was taking too long to get to the point. I'm sure it's great and I understand it's something to do with glasses and subvocalizations, but consider a one sentence contextualization at the top of the page.

LatencyKills 54 minutes ago | parent

I was just trying to help a vibe coder and immediately noticed that their README.md was over 2,000 lines long. I asked, "Why is your readme so long?" and their response was, "This is just a really complicated application."

The app essentially manages a bunch of TODO items written in markdown.

derefr 44 minutes ago | parent

For some reason AI coding agents seem to think a README should be a Product Requirements Document (PRD).

I think it's because most projects don't have any settled place (or at least, any place that lives inside the project's source-code repo) to record PRD-like information.

But because AI coding agents really do benefit from having PRD-like info (i.e. a hierarchical breakdown of the "intended what" and "intended how" of the system that "should" exist in the repo, kept updated to reflect changing ideas about those intentions), they really want to record that type of info somewhere, so they can then reference it.

AI coding agents don't seem to have any "taste" (or maybe "confidence"?) when it comes to asserting that even if you don't already have a separate PRD-like file in the repo, you should have one, if you want the agent to do its job well, and so it would request you to let it create one (or just automatically do it.) Instead, they just shrug and cram the PRD stuff into whatever structure you do already have. Which, if you're starting fresh with a greenfield project, is usually just a README.

(I hypothesize that if you tell an AI coding agent to use Behavior-Driven Development [BDD] on a greenfield project, it'll probably lean toward maintaining its PRD-like info in the form of BDD test cases. Haven't tried this experiment yet; would be interested to know the outcome!)

LatencyKills 36 minutes ago | parent

That is exactly what happened in this case; the readme was the PRD.

Throughout the document Claude kept claiming that issues were "mitigated but not fixed". They were essentially bandaid fixes for things it couldn't figure out. When I pointed this out to the author he said, "Well Claude thinks it works."

I wonder what happens to software when enough people try to ship projects like this.

aarushyadav 53 minutes ago | parent

Yup that makes sense. Thanks for the feedback, we'll make some changes shortly!

jasonlotito 48 minutes ago | parent

> Talk without talking. > Input text at the speed of speech, silently and invisibly.

I understood from just this. But the demo video impressed even further.

> Spent 30 seconds scrolling down to try to figure out what this is.

Did you try reading the site? Or maybe doing something other than just scrolling?

Does it need some form of subway surfer to get you to pay attention?

> Eventually clicked away from the site because it was taking too long to get to the point.

So yeah... subway surfer. This generation is cooked.

jstummbillig 1 hour ago | parent

Category: A product, that's obviously super useful, as long as it will work.

tomhow 1 hour ago | parent

I'm curious about whether this could be done with the hardware mounted on top of the laptop screen or on a stand on the desk, rather than the glasses form factor. Have you explored this?

aarushyadav 1 hour ago | parent

Yes, we have! The same kind of RF doesn't work in that form, since it is attenuated strongly over that big of a distance. But the other interesting alternative we tried it mmWave radar, RF at about 60 GHz, the same band as 5G. This is much more similar to conventional radar, in that it would bounce off the face rather than passing through it like our current system. We found a few problems with this: 1. It faced the same issue as cameras. mmWave radar has a very low penetration in tissue, so it basically just bounced off the mouth. This only let us see visemes, which aren't enough to get to a low error rate as complete phonetic decoding can. 2. While mmWave radar can detect skin movement as small as a few microns via Doppler shift (given it's small wavelength), its spatial resolution with most systems is quite low. For example, it can tell that something moved 2 microns but within a 5cm x 5cm block. This coarse information makes it very hard to decode

That's why we weren't able to make something that can mount to your laptop. We're trying to make a necklace form factor at some point in the future though, but can't give a date on this!

dist-epoch 59 minutes ago | parent

What about something like a baseball cap instead of glasses? Or some sort of head band?

aarushyadav 58 minutes ago | parent

Exploring that too as a next product, but probably a while down the line!

Lerc 43 minutes ago | parent

How about a cap with a propellor on it that spins when receiving words :)

adamsmark 1 hour ago | parent

I use the Vekta. I tried whispering and it doesn't feel right.

Throat mics don't work at all - see reviews online.

This is a different approach, so I am cautiously optimistic.

TechSquidTV 1 hour ago | parent

I would be fairly interested if this works without opening my mouth. Like, if you can nail _micro_ tongue movements, it would feel pretty close to thought.

aarushyadav 1 hour ago | parent

It actually can! Since the RF can see inside your mouth the system doesn't inherently need lip movements and can be fine tuned on what we call "internal speech". Note that this isn't the automatic tongue movements that occur when "thinking" words to yourself, but it's rather like mouthing with your lips closed. We don't often lead with this since it's weird for many people to do, but with a bit of practice, we have been able to get it down pretty well.

dang 53 minutes ago | parent

Wow that's fascinating. I've added that bit to your text above - I hope that's ok! It answers what was emerging as a sort of mini-FAQ.

Edit: the more that I think about it the cooler and more important this feature seems!

hk__2 49 minutes ago | parent

But how would you distinguish all the sounds that don’t require any tongue movement, like (most of?) the vowels?

aarushyadav 41 minutes ago | parent

There's subtle changes in internal speech muscles as well often for those kinds of movements, and where it does seem ambiguous language context is usually enough to distinguish

popap 1 hour ago | parent

That is fascinating. How do the radio waves get modulated? Do you think it is possible to use this technique for spying technology, with remote transmitters and receivers intersecting a person's facial anatomy to pick up the details of even a whispered or muttered conversation?

aarushyadav 58 minutes ago | parent

Most probably not possible to do this remotely, since this kind of RF needs to be transmitted through the face, and if you transmit them from too far away very few of them will actually take a path that goes through the face and comes back to your receiver.

They get modulated since your mouth is a complex dielectric environment. Tissue, water, and air have different dielectric constants (different permittivity to RF) and the motion of the muscles in this medium leads to interactions with the waves that fill it, changing their phase and amplitude as they propagate.

ciefa 1 hour ago | parent

God do I hate websites that make you scroll to go through an animation, why do people still do this

cebert 49 minutes ago | parent

It is frustrating and makes me close a lot of sites

hippycruncher22 1 hour ago | parent

What's wrong with human connection and speaking. :( I feel like the isolation of this modern world is lame.

doctorhandshake 57 minutes ago | parent

This is a little like replying to a show HN for a new kind of stylus input device with “what’s wrong with pen and paper”

temp123477 55 minutes ago | parent

This is more a keyboard killer than a dinner party killer.

ShinTakuya 54 minutes ago | parent

I can see this being useful on public transport where you don't want to bother people while taking notes verbally. It's not all about avoiding connection.

augment_me 53 minutes ago | parent

Maybe you don't want strangers around you hearing you say "Hey Claude wish my grandma happy birthday" as it's not yet morally okay to delegate such social tasks to the models

qwertygnu 44 minutes ago | parent

Your example proves their point perfectly. You shouldn't delegate wishing your grandma happy birthday to a fucking AI agent. And you should feel ashamed for doing so. And you should feel the social pressure to hide that fact if you do resort to it.

While this tech doesn't feel quite as dystopian as most recent AI innovations, I do think it is a further step in the direction of human disconnection.

hk__2 41 minutes ago | parent

Well you both prove each other’s point ;)

233mhz 34 minutes ago | parent

Aha what a loser thing to do, I personally have a fleet of 347 agents running 24/7 talking to my parents, siblings, grandparents, friends, asking them how they're doing and wishing them a happy birthday when the time comes. I can finally focus on the important things!

internet_points 20 minutes ago | parent

Haha, I can't tell if this is a parody or not

barbazoo 25 minutes ago | parent

There is no human connection typing words into a box, that's seems like what it's mostly replacing. Talking to your email client, talking to your AI agent. Lots of us are much faster speaking than typing and especially with AI, it doesn't matter a whole lot in my experience how polished the output is, the benefit from ending up with a lot more text because one can just talk freely is very beneficial.

ideasphere 57 minutes ago | parent

Just scroll normally!

johnhamlin 56 minutes ago | parent

With so many people singing the praises of voice to text, I keep thinking about how most sci-fi futures feature subvocalization as a prerec for that kind of adoption. Always love to see sci-fi come to life!

bluegatty 55 minutes ago | parent

Why do you destroy communicating your very cool product with an annoying and counter intuitive scroll experience?

And after some time I could not figure out what this is?

Put this part: " building smart glasses that let you talk to your computer without talking out loud. You can mouth words silently and discreetly and the glasses decode them to text at the speed of speech."

right at the top and show someone doing that instead of hiding behind cryptic marketing.

Also, the product looks great.

Get your words out of the way 'say what it is'.

Very amazing tech though

aarushyadav 50 minutes ago | parent

That makes sense. We will implement that!

avree 54 minutes ago | parent

Do most people talk faster than they can type? It's the opposite for me - I also read aloud slower than I can read in my head.

aarushyadav 49 minutes ago | parent

Most people type at 40-50 WPM. Developers can often type at 70-100 WPM. Meanwhile, most people can talk at 120-200 WPM. Beyond just speed, we've found with many people that talking things out tends to flow more naturally, since it's often a lower friction action so people don't "sanitize" the text in their head before outputting it. Leads to better prompts quite often :)

achandra03 38 minutes ago | parent

> talking things out tends to flow more naturally,

I've found the opposite. Typing feels much more "deliberate", and of course you can hit backspace but you can't un-speak a word. With prompting, I've found that, in general, speaking leads to lower-quality results than typing.

cogythea 36 minutes ago | parent

The bit before your quote was

> with many people

Not everyone. I, at least, definitely overthink what I type, and while I end up with nice-ish sentences in my prompts it takes a lot longer than a train of thought that the AI parses correctly most of the time anyway.

chicagobuss 26 minutes ago | parent

When I try talking for prompting my coding agents, I'm always severely disappointed with the specificity of the prompt. It's just much easier for me to "talk about" coding specifics with a keyboard than it is for me to speak about them, for some reason.

I suspect this has to do with the nature of the work you're doing; I dunno, just count me firmly in the camp of people who only rarely feel like I can express a thought sufficiently for coding agents with their voice.

LorenPechtel 21 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, we have a lot of experience with typing while our eyes and mind are occupied elsewhere. But I've noticed the years have slowed my typing.

briandw 15 minutes ago | parent

I'm dyslexic and while I can type fairly quickly it's always a struggle to get the spelling and typing mistakes fixed. Talking is a much more natural way to express myself. The frustration of not being able to spell the word that I want doesn't exist. Mis-transcription errors are of course an issue, but those are getting fewer and fewer.

kqp 5 minutes ago | parent

Also, speech is probably bottlenecked by speed of thought, not making the sounds. I recall some study showing that data rate is pretty consistent between languages, despite wpm varying significantly due to language verbosity. You can try it yourself: try to quickly repeat “one two three four five” then try to read a paragraph out loud as quickly as you can, I bet you can feel the first strain your muscles and the second your brain, and I bet the first blows your typing wpm out of the water.

xbar 47 minutes ago | parent

Most people talk faster than they can type. 80 wpm voice chat is easy for everyone. 80 wpm typing filters out most typists.

mrngld 30 minutes ago | parent

This has been an interesting thing for me to watch as it's such a case of people having widely different experiences. I'm sure people that didn't grow up on a keyboard like me can probably talk quicker than they type, but even aside from me being a fairly good typist my speech is held up by being a bit more halting, a bit more of backtracking on word choice, sometimes not quite the same 'voice' of writing as I'm aiming for, all of which obliterates any speed advantage it'd have for me.

But happy to see people get more options.

This reminds me of Eternity's End by Jeffrey Carver and the implants they had. Released in 2000 but the more time goes on the more the neural implant technology is coming about. To be fair I think Enders Game had similar tech to detect subvocal speech like this product.

1dom 24 minutes ago | parent

> This has been an interesting thing for me to watch as it's such a case of people having widely different experiences.

Same. I'm often told I talk too fast, but I feel I communicate slowly because a lot of my fast speech involves halting and backtracking and such.

I can easily type 100WPM+, but I trivially blast out a few paragraphs of perfectly adequate text in a few seconds and then spend a few minutes re-editing it.

lstodd 29 minutes ago | parent

Writing also filters the useless crap that is spoken but is not worth writing down.

Zambyte 44 minutes ago | parent

I'm not reading aloud most of the time that I'm talking.

egeozcan 44 minutes ago | parent

Yes, I'd estimate the vast majority of people speak faster they can type. Not sure about the thinking part because I usually have 20 threads going parallel in my head and can't imagine what normal thinking would be like.

sspiff 41 minutes ago | parent

I'm the same. I also can think ahead / along much better while typing. When I'm talking I'm just talking, not thinking as much.

But I guess thinking is going out of style anyway.

That said, I know a lot of people prefer talking to their computer, especially when their computer is a phone. So there is definitely a place for stuff like this.

rickydroll 39 minutes ago | parent

You need to train yourself to speak written speech. When you do that, the thought processes behind typing your words activate, and your language use changes.

jbs789 33 minutes ago | parent

How?

lstodd 31 minutes ago | parent

Why bother when old ways work _and_ there is no benefit? Or name one.

1dom 28 minutes ago | parent

As a person who often talks far too fast and incoherently, but types generally fast and legibly, I had never recognised or even considered this, but it seems helpful. Thanks.

wongarsu 35 minutes ago | parent

While sitting at the desk, I type about as fast as I talk. While unloading the dishwasher I'm a much faster talker than typer

ronyeh 18 minutes ago | parent

On my phone, I do. I still like to tap with my thumbs, but my iPhone keyboard sucks so when I need to type a lot, I’d rather dictate.

mirmor23 50 minutes ago | parent

The tech sounds cool, but my guess is this product might work for anyone whose text to command ratio is very high. If the formatting and commanding are the main tasks, then this product would be more of a distraction for a fast typist.

Regarding the website, you should lead with product, its details, rather than founders shown in 360 degrees from various vantage points. It is distracting and frankly irritating.

sourpanda 50 minutes ago | parent

I think this is incredibly cool and straight out of a sci-fi novel! I think this is phenomenal for accessibility and for hands-free computing in general. I also agree with other comments that the website should have more detail on how it works, such as what you included in the post body. Amazing work guys!

themanmaran 37 minutes ago | parent

Yea in one of the further Ender's Game novels they talk about this tech a lot for characters silently mumbling to the AI.

joshgachnang 13 minutes ago | parent

Ahhhh exactly! I've wanted this since I was a kid and read those books.

ElijahLynn 8 minutes ago | parent

I second that. I've been talking and talking to my phone and AI even more and more since it keeps getting better and is generally pretty accurate these days. And there are times when I end up typing because of environmental reasons.

This is just really groundbreaking and I know the research has been out there for a little while but to actually implement is a whole nother ball game.

I think the use cases for this will expand as the product ships and gets out there!

_jholland 4 minutes ago | parent

Agree, incredibly cool, and I could definitely see myself using one, but it does give off slightly dystopian vibes, making me think of the speakwrite in 1984:

"In the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into speakwrites, there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name"

gh5000 50 minutes ago | parent

Cue the resurgence of lip reading-based espionage. Imagining having to scan the room for people watching subvocalizers. Will subvocalizers start holding up a clipboard over their face a la NFL coaches?

80fj0348i 32 minutes ago | parent

That's already been a problem ever since people figured out you can recover voice from watching the subpixel vibration of objects within a room. (Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUzB0L0mSCI)

There is a reason secure activity happens within secured rooms built to a specific standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_inform...

proee 49 minutes ago | parent

There is a product by Subtle called Voicebuds that allows for super silent dictation. Looks like the product is not available for purchase yet, but I would prefer to have earbuds over glasses.

https://www.subtle.co

aarushyadav 11 minutes ago | parent

Yup those are pretty cool too! How do you feel about quiet whispering vs completely silent? Genuinely curious we haven't asked too many people

settsu 48 minutes ago | parent

FYI, the subvocal.company site is unscrollable with a mouse wheel in WebKit browsers on Mac (Safari, DDG, Kagi Orion), though the touchpad will work. No issues elsewhere (Mac non-WebKit, Win11, Ubuntu)

aarushyadav 36 minutes ago | parent

Looking into it

joshstrange 46 minutes ago | parent

Super excited to see more products in this area. I talk to my computer the majority of the time now, and I can do that because I work from home. If I were on public transportation or in an office, it would be much more difficult. It's been interesting to watch the Overton window, if you will, shift for people talking _to_ their phones. Now, the majority of my family will use voice to text on their phone whereas I remember just a few years ago, if not even just a year ago, it was made fun of.

sixtyj 45 minutes ago | parent

There is a long way from a prototype to production. Remember Google Glasses, Oculus, Meta Rayban, Apple Vision Pro?

All of them are visionary and we would think that ppl gonna like them…

Well… ordinary people want boring tech.

This will be similar with whispering to glasses… Visionaries will like it… and return to missionary (boring) s*x (I hope that I don’t get a ban.)

Myself, I would buy these glasses immediately. But I would hate them as well as I would think I am insane (who wants to talk to yourself?).

Edit: Dang replied. I wish all the best to the team behind “whisper glasses”. It is amazing. Connect it with ElevenLabs and you rule the world. (Previous: It wasn’t meant a hate speech.)

dang 40 minutes ago | parent

(Don't worry, we're not going to ban you.)

A tasteless sex reference is one thing, but shallow-curmudgeonly dismissal of new work is the real sin here!

sixtyj 23 minutes ago | parent

This wasn’t meant as a hate. Sorry if it sound so. I really like them, I would buy them. Immediately. Sign me in.

But I think (and see) that people prefer boring tech. Whisper glasses is amazing. But most people will probably find it creepy. (Pareto applied.). I hope I am wrong. These guys are like from sci-fi.

sschueller 43 minutes ago | parent

So it's a pair of glasses that can transcribe when you mouth words silently? I still don't know how it works, they say no cameras and it works with noise so I assume sort sort of reverse bone conducting?

polyterative 42 minutes ago | parent

Says right in the description that they are using radio

jedberg 15 minutes ago | parent

The whole paragraph above explains it. Radio through your head.

smokel 42 minutes ago | parent

Are there any health risks with this method?

Edit: mostly concerned about RF near my eyes for 8 hours a day.

hirako2000 38 minutes ago | parent

Sensorimotor debility is a thing. This gadget surely won't help with it.

HIP_HOP 37 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, so a recent study discovered that talking silently makes other people harder to hear you so they think they have problem hearing.

aarushyadav 15 minutes ago | parent

No, the RF is very low power and can safely be active on your face for long periods. We've done a lot of investigation and verification with safety. While doing R&D the first 2 months we collected hundreds of hours of data on ourselves with various configurations, so we made sure it was safe before :)

Also, the RF transmission only activates when you're actively dictating.

replete 41 minutes ago | parent

Infuriating website UX, you really must add the scrollbar back. Apple do shiny things like this but they know you can't get rid of the scrollbar and piss people off trying to look at information

polartx 39 minutes ago | parent

Reminds me of the Leap Motion I preordered

skilning 38 minutes ago | parent

Does the model require internet access, or is it running entirely locally?

aarushyadav 12 minutes ago | parent

Yes, it requires internet access

mrtesthah 37 minutes ago | parent

Apple recently a purchased a company with seemingly equivalent technical capabilities:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apple-qai-ac...

Hope you guys are well-positioned patent-wise.

aarushyadav 10 minutes ago | parent

Yup, Q.ai is different tech and we have our :)

They use speckle patterns of a laser shone onto the skin, which is sensitive down to tens of nanometers. Pretty cool tech

capl 36 minutes ago | parent

Watched the demo video… and if this is satire: incredibly well executed

aarushyadav 10 minutes ago | parent

It's not :)

kenferry 34 minutes ago | parent

This is very cool, but oddly, the site is TOO focused on the user problem being solved to the extent that it feels like snake oil. The issue is that this is contrary to people's experience of what is possible, so without discussing WHY you can do this, it looks like a scam or vaporware.

aarushyadav 18 minutes ago | parent

Fair feedback, will take into account. Looking to change up the site quite a bit soon!

collabs 33 minutes ago | parent

I am so glad to see an unpolished early look and an honest evaluation of about five percent error rate in the YouTube video. The really cool stuff will be the applications on top of `subvocal` though at least in my opinion.

So this could take "noise canceling" to a whole new level if you could somehow "speak" across a loud bar or across the world, for that matter. Being integrated into something like Signal or similar end to end encrypted platform would be interesting as well.

aarushyadav 20 minutes ago | parent

Yep, I agree. Noise cancellation is a feature we want to release at some point in the future. Using the RF to denoise a very noisy audio signal which has you speaking in it. And we'll release an SDK as well a few months after shipping to build stuff on top of it!

clkao 32 minutes ago | parent

this is super cool. I did some digging about current research on avsr using video and lip point cloud movement a while back. found projects like https://github.com/amanvirparhar/chaplin but this seems more promising!

json_hero 32 minutes ago | parent

Should really just be like a leap motion device on the desk, glasses are so gimmicky and aren't gonna fly for people with prescriptions (a large set of people in-front of computers all day)

xur17 20 minutes ago | parent

People with prescriptions can just get versions with prescriptions in them (this is a thing for "smart" glasses already).

conductr 15 minutes ago | parent

Can, but as a new product it is going to limit their adoption rate by some pretty significant amount.

philsnow 14 minutes ago | parent

half of the other people in the office in the video are wearing prescription glasses

monkeydust 32 minutes ago | parent

One of the coolest things I have recently seen but would love some details. It also got me thinking a about this recent Neuralink post.

https://neuralink.com/updates/72-hour-voice-hackathon/

kmoser 26 minutes ago | parent

You can have a silent conversation with someone else wearing the device? This does not bode well for casinos.

darkstar999 7 minutes ago | parent

A casino would have no problem seeing mouth movement.

MPSimmons 24 minutes ago | parent

This is super cool. I think it's the first piece of additional hardware I've even considered pre-ordering.

intrasight 20 minutes ago | parent

I did research in this space about eight years ago. Our approach was to look at deformations in the ear canal. Rumor has it that Apple AirPods will have sensors in the ear canal. I was hoping to use those sensors with our app, but it looks like Apple is not going to provide access to the raw sensor data. I expected Apple is going to support subvocal speech pretty soon.

lukko 23 minutes ago | parent

Great work!

Really like seeing the early prototypes here, and would love to see more on how the RF tech works on the website.

Are you able to patent it?

dogscatstrees 19 minutes ago | parent

Let's go! Love the idea. Like the analog to bone conduction earbuds. Just please don't turn into WisprFlow where they route the voice metadata, unbeknownst to many, to a third party partner who stores and mines it for who-knows-what. Good luck fellas.

aarushyadav 15 minutes ago | parent

Of course! Privacy is important!

jdironman 14 minutes ago | parent

What I would really like is a washable "cyber suit". Mock or turtle neck (for the voice / STT capture / control), EEG sensors, breathing rate, blood pressure, gestures via arm motion sensors,). Removable rechargeable battery module to wash the torso / shirt slap it on a clean one. For EEG it would have to be pretty compressed though, so not sure it would be comfortable enough to wear to sleep? maybe only an internal harness needs to be that compressed. not sure. I'm tired of wearing a Fitbit, or glasses, or these different things people have to look at, keep up with, break easy etc.

mmaths 14 minutes ago | parent

I wonder if in a couple of years we gonna have some teeth implant that will capture sounds to our devices.

popupeyecare 11 minutes ago | parent

Preordered!

Can we use RF for other medical applications? As an anesthesiologist, we do nerve blocks before surgeries or for pain. One rough indicator that it's working is muscle paralysis. Also similar for botox.

Very interested.

howunfortunate 10 minutes ago | parent

This is:

1. Insanely cool

2. Gives me serious "whispering earring" vibes. Imagine having a full on conversation with an AI via subvocalization and listening with ear bud to guide you throughout the day. https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2012-10-03-yva...

contingencies 9 minutes ago | parent

Much respect for actual innovation. I hope you get filthy rich.

airbreather 8 minutes ago | parent

Website is shit, "how it works" tells you nothing much useful about how it works, and I assume there is some custom hardware (as described in the post above) but nowhere on the website I could see this actually said, and therefore zero indication of the size of the interface electronics etc etc

vessenes 7 minutes ago | parent

Just preordered -- glasses request: there's no way to say it nicely, I have a big nose. With a high bridge. Many glasses are really tough to get properly placed; may I request you not give up on the pads w/metal adjusters that you have in the product photos? Don't let a designer take them away from you, us folks not one standard deviation from 'normal' noses will thank you.

Second, how tough is this signal processing? Will it be done on-glasses, or through an app? Third, what's the equivalent of a wake word for these? I'm reminded of the Apple Vision Pro radar to see if your fingers are clicking. I could imagine a lot of modalities where I want to just start talking and have things happen, and a lot where I don't want the glasses to pick it up. Fourth, I think a cool voice change demo would be rad -- not sure what latency is like, but if you could get it end to end under like 250ms you could probably have someone exaggerate the mouth movements and pipe out audio of them talking like someone else. Which would be another really cool demo.

Super cool. You're going to be working 80 hour weeks for the next year, I'm excited to see what you put out!

0x4e 5 minutes ago | parent

For the ones thinking this is great, have you actually tried to talk without making sounds?

I don't think it is an intuitive action at all and I became self-conscious about not making a sound rather than talking like I normally would.

I suppose it would require some "getting used to."

Regardless, I think it is a cool idea and a real problem. Sometimes I don't want to type nor talk out loud so I find myself whispering at my phone like I'm telling it a dirty secret.

As I'm writing this, I think this kind of product might not hot the market for consumers, but I'm seeing this used by Flock like companies to spy on people's speech, so kudos on making machine lip reading a thing!