This technology won't necessarily stop a human listener from understanding someone if they're snooping (you can give recordings a listen and view the source code at the link above). Rather, this is a system designed to stop devices equipped with microphones from transmitting automatically transcribed recordings. It's quiet – just above a whisper – but can generate sound specifically modeled to obscure speech in real time so that conversations can't be transcribed by software and acted upon or the text sent back to some remote server for processing...
According to Vondrick, the algorithm his team developed can stop a
microphone-equipped AI model from interpreting speech 80 percent of the
time, all without having to hear a whole recording, or knowing anything
about the gadget doing the listening. more
