“No one cared who I was until I put on the mask” -Bane
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Skyted, a Toulouse, France-based startup founded by former Airbus VP Stéphane Hersen and acoustical engineer Frank Simon, is bringing what look like a pair of human muzzles to CES 2024.
Skyted’s masks are built from sound-dampening material that Simon developed while at ONERA, the French aerospace lab — originally for jet engines.
They sync (via wire or wirelessly) to a smartphone app that offers a pass-through toggle to pipe speech through the phone’s speaker — minimizing the need to remove the mask.
On its website, Skyted advertises… unusual in-app features like a “voice awareness” mode that lets parents quiet their noisy mask-donning kids while they’re playing video games.
Skyted, in fact, pitches the masks as a more “immersive” way to play games and even has a section of its website dedicated to defense and military applications.
The scattershot go-to-market — coupled with the eye-watering $299 starting price and low-tech competition — doesn’t bode well for Skyted’s upcoming Kickstarter.
The original article contains 489 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
” Called the “Mobility Privacy Mask” and “Hybrid Silent Mask,” the face-worn accoutrements are designed to “absorb voice frequencies” in noisy environments like plains, trains and rideshares, Hersen says.
“Skyted’s solution is ideal for commuters, business executives and travelers anywhere,” Hersen is quoted as saying in a press release. “No matter how busy or public the location is, they can now speak in silence and with the assurance that no one nearby can hear their conversation.”
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Really cool sounding tech. Wonder how well it works, I would really love having something like this at work for when I need to make sensitive calls or even when I’m just venting to myself at my desk about a dipshit coworker/client.
There are two groups of people worried about being listened to in public. Conspiracy theorists wouldn’t trust the tech behind this, nor probably even cell phones. Executives likely to use such a device aren’t using public transit.
Everyone else would be voluntarily using such a device to make things quieter for others, and the last time we tried to get people to wear a mask to benefit others was a huge failure and the consequences were far greater.
No one is going to buy this.
Disagree, my role requires attendance and participation in business calls constantly, and it’s not a very unique role at a company. Being able to do so in public places or traveling would be useful often, depending on how cumbersome this is to wear.
Additionally I could see this being very useful with sales folks, essentially any role with talking as a main component.
Now in its initial form it may be unwieldy but future iterations, if it can be slimmed down and/or add additional capabilities there is for sure use cases. Even with the general public being able to call family/friends on your commute home would be useful I would think.
Executives likely to use such a device aren’t using public transit.
Yes they are. Probably not in the country that calls it transit, mind. And lots of people would like to be able to have more private conversations in public, whether or not they’re travelling at the time.
Plus, I’ve seen a lot of threads over the years from gamers, or the people who have to live with them, looking for something exactly like this.
So Get Smart did it 60 years ago!
https://markozen.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/conex.jpg?w=500
A product that will allow me to stop hearing loud phone talkers in public? Awesome. Now can I please get a cannon that will fire these onto people’s faces? That’d be greeeeat
I’ve found joining in the conversation works 80% of the time .15% they complain, but it still works. The 5% can get awkward, unless you’re really up for making a new, highly extroverted friend!
I sometimes do this with people walking past my house yammering to someone on their phone. I live in a nice quiet neighborhood and people go out for their walks and just YELL into their headpieces, sometimes with foul language, like they’re in their own world.
But with that asshole on the train I need to be in for the next 40 minutes, it’s a little more awkward.
noisy environments like plains, trains and rideshares.
I dunno. Plains are usually pretty isolated and quiet.
