alterego is a AI intelligent headset developed by MIT media lab that picks up on neuromuscular signals that trigger when you subvocalize – that’s talking in your head in layman’s terms. the system consists of a wearable device and an associated computing system that can transcribe words that the user verbalizes internally but does not speak aloud.

 

electrodes in the device pick up neuromuscular signals in the jaw and face that are triggered by internal verbalizations — saying words ‘in your head’ — but are undetectable to the human eye. the signals are then fed to a machine-learning system that has been trained to correlate particular signals with particular words.

 

video by MIT media lab

 

 

the idea seems like pure science fiction but in fact, internal verbalizations and their physical correlations s have been a serious thought and study since the 19th centure. one of the goals of the speed-reading movement of the 1960s was to eliminate internal verbalization, or ‘subvocalization,’ as it’s known.

 

‘the motivation for this was to build an IA device — an intelligence-augmentation device,’ says arnav kapur, a graduate student at the MIT media lab, who led the development of the new system. ‘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?‘