Say Goodbye to Alexa and Hello to Gadgets Listening to the Voice Inside Your Head
Arnav Kapur’s AlterEgo lets him communicate, switch TV channels, and more by talking silently to himself
By Rachel Metz
Controlling your gadgets by talking to them is so 2018. In the future, you won’t even have to move your lips.
A prototype device called AlterEgo, created by MIT Media Lab graduate student Arnav Kapur, is already making this possible. With Kapur’s device — a 3-D-printed plastic doodad that looks kind of like a skinny white banana attached to the side of his head — he can flip through TV channels, change the colors of lightbulbs, make expert chess moves, solve complicated arithmetic problems, and, as he recently showed a 60 Minutes crew, order a pizza, all without saying a word or lifting a finger. It can be used to let people communicate silently and unobtrusively with each other, too.
“I do feel like a cyborg, but in the best sense possible,” he says of his experience with the device, which he built as a research project.
AlterEgo does not read minds, though it may sound that way. Rather, it picks up on the itty-bitty electrical signals produced by small movements of our facial and neck muscles when we silently read or…
