Here's a cool new thing

I don't know about you, but I need a palate cleanser to take this Facebook taste out of my mouth for a minute, and I think that I may have found it.

First, some background: I am a life-long Sci Fi fan. And when I say that, I don't just mean that I love Star Trek and Star Wars and other mass-market fare. I do love those things, but they're not what hooked me on Sci Fi. No, sir/ma'am/other, I started with the hard stuff: Asimov's Robot stories, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood End and 2001: A Space Odyssey (and, yes, I read the book long before I ever saw the movie). Sci Fi concepts like subvocal interfaces are old hat, for me.

Which is probably why this story caught my eye, from The Guardian:

Researchers have created a wearable device that can read people’s minds when they use an internal voice, allowing them to control devices and ask queries without speaking.
The device, called AlterEgo, can transcribe words that wearers verbalise internally but do not say out loud, using electrodes attached to the skin.

“Our idea was: could we have a computing platform that’s more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways and that feels like an internal extension of our own cognition?” said Arnav Kapur, who led the development of the system at MIT’s Media Lab.

[...]

It is worn around the jaw and chin, clipped over the top of the ear to hold it in place. Four electrodes under the white plastic device make contact with the skin and pick up the subtle neuromuscular signals that are triggered when a person verbalises internally. When someone says words inside their head, artificial intelligence within the device can match particular signals to particular words, feeding them into a computer.

[...]

The eventual goal is to make interfacing with AI assistants such as Google’s Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri less embarrassing and more intimate, allowing people to communicate with them in a manner that appears to be silent to the outside world – a system that sounds like science fiction but appears entirely possible.

MIND. BLOWN.

Yes, this is a real photo of the thing.

This is literally something right out of a Sci Fi story, and it's already in the prototype stage. And, yes, it looks really, really dorky right now, but with a few more years, and a little more polish, I can see this being something that people actually use. I'm a verbalizer, and as someone who's found himself literally talking to himself in public more than once, the ability to do that silently, and have my device capture my stream-of-consciousness ramblings for later perusal, is a very exciting prospect.

There you go; something to be excited about, rather than just angry. You're welcome.