Noisy co-workers will be seen and not heard.
Slow typing and distracting voice notes could be rendered obsolete thanks to cutting-edge, AI-powered glasses that translate your unspoken words into text instantaneously — without making a sound.
Launched last week by San Francisco tech firm Subvocal, these state-of-the-art tech specs use sensors to detect the tiny facial movements people make while articulating words.
“When you’re mouthing words, even if you’re really discreet with it, the muscles in your face and inside your mouth are moving right,” Aarush Yadav, who founded the company in February 2026 with Georgia Tech student Arnav Kumar, told the Post. “So what the glasses do is they emit radio waves similar to Bluetooth, similar frequency, but much lower power.”
As the radio waves interact with the facial muscles, their signals change in ways that the AI can decode into speech — they literally read our body language.
Using these optical interlocuters, wearers can convert their mimed words into text at a rate of 200 words per minute, allowing people to compose everything from emails to voice notes at the speed of speech sans making a sound. They can even allow you to communicate with fellow wearers across the room silently as well, as seen in a somewhat “Black Mirror”-esque video demo with nearly 12 million views on X.
“There are no limitations,” declared Yadav, who helped develop the prototype for Stanford’s Treehacks Hackathon in February. He and Kumar have since raised $1.3 million in funding and took leaves of absence from school so they could pursue their startup full-time.
What’s the point of these digital decoders? Yadav believes they could replace clunky and sluggish keyboard typing as well as cacophonous voice-to-text software, effectively improving both workplace productivity and ambience.
“Voiceover typing is obvious,” said Yadav. “It’s extremely fast and makes you so much more productive. But when out in public in the office or in the library, we couldn’t use voice AI.
He added, “It’s just too awkward to talk into your computers and to other people as well.”
According to Yadav, these subsonic speak-tacles could benefit everyone, including programmers, journalists and other office workers and even commuters — or perhaps more importantly, fellow straphangers tired of hearing loud train conversations.
They’re also targeting heavy AI users. “A lot of AI native people type out very long prompts to AI very often,” he said. “If you have 10 agents running at the same time, you need to instruct the AI a lot. And that’s one of the main use cases for Voice AI right now.”
The devices are currently available for preorder with an estimated March 2027 delivery. Early birds can get $200 knocked off the $699 price tag.
The subvocals have generated mixed reactions. “We’ve gone from typing to talking to our computers, and now we’re moving to communicating without making a sound,” gushed popular X account Science Girl. “This is awesome.”
Another viewer dubbed the accessories “insanely cool.”
“I am constantly on planes/in public whispering into my earbuds with Wispr Flow (voice-to-text dictation software),” they wrote. “This would be such an improvement.”
However, others feared that the incantation-esque mute mutterings could prove equally conspicuous.
“Wearing the glasses and mouthing words to yourself seems maybe more embarrassing than just talking,” declared one critic.
“Mumble rap is back and is weaponized,” quipped another.
Dr. Rafael Yuste, a Columbia University neuroscientist and director of its NeuroTechnology Center, told the Post that he had mixed feelings as well.
“I am intrigued but cautious: it’s a clever engineering step for human-computer interaction, but Subvocal hasn’t published accuracy figures, so I’d call it promising rather than a breakthrough until independent data appear,” he told the Post.
While these are muscle rather than mind-readers, Dr. Yuste said the “more physiological data we generate,” the greater the “privacy implications,” especially if that data flows upstream to companies or governments.
Not to mention that bypassing typing and speaking could have unintended cognitive consequences.
“Writing and articulating words are part of how we organize and refine our thinking, and offloading all of that could weaken those processes in ways we don’t yet understand,” Yuste said.
However, Yadav claimed that this new mode of computer interfacing could lessen, rather than increase our reliance on technology.
“If you go to a park right now and you look at everyone around you, they’re going to be looking at a device,” he insisted. “The point of glasses is to pull you away from a device like your phone and put the computing in the background.”
“So if you’re able to interact with them without touching a screen and without anyone hearing, you can use it anywhere you want and AI can do the work in the cloud for you while you can be present in the moment.”
Yadav added that “still improving the accuracy” and “design” of the subsonic speech specs, noting that the ones in the video are an “early prototype.”
“We’re moving really fast on that,” he said.
