April 6, 2023

By Louis DiPietro 

It may look like Ruidong Zhang is talking to himself, but in fact the doctoral student in the field of information science is silently mouthing the passcode to unlock his nearby smartphone and play the next song in his playlist.

It’s not telepathy: It’s the seemingly ordinary, off-the-shelf eyeglasses he’s wearing, called EchoSpeech – a silent-speech recognition interface that uses acoustic-sensing and artificial intelligence to continuously recognize up to 31 unvocalized commands, based on lip and mouth movements.