Whisp Subvocal Input – ØF

Deep Future

Pablos: Here's one of the things I think is a critical area of invention that remains unsolved, but it's definitely a part of the future. So if you're using an iPhone anywhere in the world, cultures vary. I've been working with this guy in Venezuela on a project. I text him on WhatsApp and then he replies with a voice memo like every time and so his, culture and worldview is just like talking to the phone and probably because I know Venezuelans do a lot more talking or something.

Whereas I never use voice memo. I'm texting, but a lot of that is like, I'm in public around other people and I don't want to disturb them and, disturbing people is considered uncool where I come from, but in Venezuela, like everybody's chattering all the time, probably because they're all Latinos.

Talking to your computer will become more and more common. And you can see that some people are more comfortable with it than others. I see it a lot more in people from other countries than I do in Americans. Right now, talking to Siri kind of sucks, and Alexa. These things are kind of stunted because, they're very one shot oriented. If you take your iPhone and start using the voice interface for ChatGPT, wow, it gets pretty exciting. Because now you're having this, two way, audible conversation that builds on itself over time.

And if you haven't done that, I think everybody should try it because that will give you a sense of where these things are going. Once you get that going and realize, oh, I can just do this while I'm driving or walking, and I don't have to be staring at my phone. It starts to get compelling.

And so it's not hard to imagine being, a few years down the road where ChatGPT is just listening all the time and piping in when it has the answers for you . So that's just laying the groundwork, hopefully all that makes sense.

But where I think this goes is that we need to solve one really big problem that remains, which is sub vocal input.

Ash: Okay.

Pablos: And what that means is, right now, if I'm talking, I don't want to talk to my phone, I don't even want to dictate text messages or do voice memo, because there's people around listening, I don't want them here in my business. We're in this situation where the eavesdropping potential, even if you're not talking about something super secret, it could be private or whatever. I don't want to play a message from you out loud and I want other people hearing things that I haven't screened yet, who knows what you're talking about.

So, what sub vocal input would do is give you the ability to just essentially whisper and have your phone pick it up. People around you wouldn't hear you, wouldn't understand you but you would still use the same machinery that you have and we all have the ability to whisper, and and quietly. If you're trying to whisper for someone else to hear you, maybe it gets kind of loud, but if you're just trying to whisper to yourself, it can be super quiet.

We know that this should be possible, and we know that because deaf people are able to train themselves to do lip reading pretty well. So a deaf person who's, got nothing, bothering them audibly can sometimes, apply enough focus to the task of learning how to read lips that they can do a really good job of it.

So there's enough of a signal in what your phone could see. So you know with Face ID there's a tiny little LiDAR sensor that's doing depth, and it can see your face. It can see the, minute details about your face. That's why it can tell, the difference between your face and a photo of you and your twin brother or sister, whatever.

So it might be possible right now. With the hardware that's in an iPhone, even though you probably don't have access to the right APIs for this to work, but m