Then it wouldn't be a "telephone" call, would it?

The reason I referred to this as a telephone call is: it is all(except electrodes) incorporated into a standard-looking cell phone.

There were concerns that as the technology improved to the point where electrodes were not required, it would present many security problems, the least of which would be exam cheats,etc.

I have recently seen an article on a thought-to-text translator.

Couple these 2 technologies with a blue tooth-like device (and actually embedded in a tooth filling) and there are some really startling possibilities.

Yes there are. How far will we go to take the human experience out of every day living?

The need for a physical body may soon be coming to an end. All we'll need to exist will be a reliable power supply and a virtual body to house our existence, which is now stored on a 30Gbit DVD.

Thanks, but no thanks. I'll take the aches and pains that my present body gives me every morning when I pull myself out of bed. And my friends don't care which aisle I'm in when I'm at the store.

30 GB?How archaic.They can now store TBs on a DNA molecule.700 TB on 1 Kg, I think.

Consider a grain of wheat sized interface device tucked away in your cheek, between tooth and jaw,hardly noticeable, or even smaller, between the teeth.You would have to floss as a security measure when entering a secure facility, and undergo a DNA scan.This is still not as dramatic as it can get,because no one has ever out-guessed the future of technology.It eventually catches up to and surpasses all current imagination which spurs even more innovation.Innovation is like a snowball rolling downhill, picking up mass all along the way.The mass of current technology has begun to reach an amazing(alarming to some) level.The future is closer than you think.If we succeed as a species for long enough, we will truly have feature that would seem ti be God-like to today's inhabitants.

How about green skin, without the need to feed,simple exposure to light would suffice? No bigotry? No war?

Making anything from a basic stock of hydrogen atoms?(Which are plentiful in the universe), or from any other element,which in turn was created in a neutron star by a similar process.

A moisture conserving system that would make fresh water unnecessary?

Voiceless communication? No language barriers?

Human powered flight for long distances?

Human enhancement by genetic manipulation and artificial enhancement by embedded robotic prosthesis?

The strength of a lion, the intelligence of man?(The Sphinx rings a bell---what were they trying to tell us that is so obvious to see, yet so hard to perceive?)

I have not even scratched the oxide coating off of the future,and there is no telling what lies ahead.

Much has been accomplished in my relatively short lifetime.

Happy sailing to all of the next generations as they journey forth.

I don't doubt that, some day, we'll have implants in the back of our heads, hooked up to our brains.

I'm glad I won't be around to see it.

HTRN, you should really cite your sources so everybody knows where reality ends and speculation begins.

NASA has a system for purposefully mapping subvocal grunts to a limited number of "words" from sensors in the neck:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2004/04_18AR.html

State of the art BCI interfaces directly with Broca area in the brain, with these capabilities:

aaaaaaaaaaaaa
http://asadl.org/jasa/resource/1/jasman/v125/i4/p2496_s3?bypassSSO=1

ooooooooooooooo

http://singularityhub.com/2010/01/04/wireless-device-reads-brain-signals-turns-them-into-speech-video/

Not to denigrate the present capabilities, there are at least a couple of words that can be conveyed with vowels alone. "OW!!!" comes to mind.

The tongue is considered a useful I/O device because of its range of motion, density of nerves (including taste and touch), and its athletic endurance of being incessantly wagged. If you have a reference on reading tongue signals for speech, please enlighten, I didn't find any, and I would expect there is just way too much other stuff going on with the tongue for 'subvocal' speech signals to be isolated (including a lot of mainly involuntary or 'automatic' sense/responses and movements which are busy 24/7 to keep food, saliva etc from going down the wrong pipe. The electrical potentials from motor neurons are HUGE cw others, and physical movement is a major source of interference for people who want to measure the little stuff...Note the direct Broca BCI results above are in "locked-in" or paralyzed subjects ie motor neuron interference is eliminated.)

You can DIY a tongue experiment if you can stand it like, this one's open source. Just mind the wires hangin from your mouth.

Oh and by the way, the ol green skin plan is not actually 'nutrient free', as any gardener will tell you, it's going to work best when you're up to your knees in horse$h^t.

I doubt I am the only one that saw the tv article,someone else will pop up, I am sure.On the show, they demonstrated it working,of course you really cant believe anything on tv.

It was on Discovery Channel, I think, but not certain.I have also tried in vain to locate the article.It is out there somewhere.

As for the green skinned humanoid needing fertilizer, you are still thinking natural plants, not a mammal/plant hybrid, where the CO2 and waste products of the mammal portion are used as food for the vegetable portion, and the sugar produced by the plant portion feed the mammal part.A closed loop system in one animal.Nature has been doing this for millions of years,but never combined them in one animal.Man will eventually do this.

Think out of the flower pot.

Telephone, n. An invention of the devil that abrogates the advantage of telling a disagreeable person to keep his distance.

--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

And now it's even worse...

You could turn your volume down and use 'text to speech' software on a cell phone, that would be pretty much the same thing from your end....

I have found that just not answering the phone solves a lot of talking issues for me!

(Until the wife comes home and asks why I didn't pick up anyway.)

Does this mean that you'll be able to tell your friends that you are now on the potato chip isle without moving your lips?

I FOUND IT! It was on NEW SCIENTIST.It uses a collar now, not electrodes as I first saw it.

Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyN4ViZ21N0

It is by Texas Instruments, and evidently requires a little practice.

Welcome to the future!

I see it is the same concept as the NASA device, using movements of the throat/larynx and teaching the machine to recognize them and generate words or phrases which have been 'learned' in the vocabulary. You can build a bigger vocabulary, but I doubt this will ever become a "phonemic" voice generation system that pronounces the sound of a word that isn't in vocab. Machines really don't do that very well afaik (but correct me if I'm wrong).

The same "phrasebook" approach to silent communication could equally be done with simple hand gestures, by teaching the machine what phrase to generate when you make a specific finger motion. It might well be quicker.

Neither of these actually lead towards a "thought to text" technology, since what is read are muscle movements, not actual "speech" signals from the brain, which are the Broca area signals being read directly in the BCI experiments I linked in the other post.

I can see the usefulness of the collar for ALS or astronaut, where the range of motion for other approaches may not be available, and the lag time is acceptable because it's unavoidable. The promotion of the collar as a way to take important calls in public is kinda funny, though.... keeping the important caller waiting so you can generate "yeah, definitely" without being heard..

Sending text messages do not use vocal sounds.

Yikes!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhNM2K8cmU8&feature=player_embedded

It actually sounds like a good idea. Few things are as annoying as having to listen to someone yakking on their cell phone.

Yes, I just can't wait till all of our thoughts can be recorded on the little chip under our tongue. The hacker can have a ball with that one. And the 'powers that be' can have a 'heyday' when you see a beautiful person and let your thoughts go wild for an instant. I married one..

I saw something similar on TV a year or two ago. If I recall correctly the one I saw only had electrodes on the outside of the neck. I didn't do much looking but I never saw anything like it again. At the moment I'm on the "it sounded too good to be true" side of the fence but I would like to be wrong.

Imagine how the development and release of this technology could change the face of advertising. TV and I-NET would become inundated with advertisements for certain "telephone based" businesses. Telemarketing could reach a whole new level. It would be pandemonium, or some other periodic element...

On a more serious note, I think there would have to have a disable function as well. The logical next step would be an embedded receiver, and I do not believe that there is enough real estate on a wavelength for my wife and I to constantly share....

Z