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March 2, 2012

Introducing the ‘Shut Up Gun’

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We’ve all been forced at some point to listen to someone yammering obnoxiously on their cell phone in a public place. But now we can fight back.

Japanese engineers have developed a speech-jamming gadget called the “SpeechJammer” gun, an “artificial speech disturbance system,” that records people and replays their own words back to them in a few hundred milliseconds. The device utilizes “delayed auditory feedback” to interfere with the speech production process. In other words, hearing your own words repeated trips up the brain and forces an obnoxious speaker to stutter, and finally fall silent. Talk about disruptive technology!

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The SpeechJammer was invented by Kazutaka Kurihara of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tskuba and Koji Tsukada of Ochanomizu University.

Watch their demonstration video here:

Follow Daniel Honan on Twitter: @DanielHonan

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