By Andrew Liszewski
If you’re stuck in a ‘cubicle-land’ as we used to call it at my old office you know that carrying on a private conversation on the phone is next to impossible with walls that are only 5 feet high.
Enter the Babble from Sonare Technologies which claims to camouflage your voice in any open workplace ensuring conversations remain private. Basically the Babble works by first recording a sampling of your typical voice patterns, then when you start to talk on the phone you activate the Babble which begins broadcasting small, seperated portions of your speech based on the tone and volume of your current conversation. This creates a sort of white noise effect that sounds like a small crowd of people all talking in your exact voice which makes it impossible to distinguish your actual phone conversation.
The Babble is made by Sonare Technologies which is actually a Herman Miller company (the people behind those expensive yet comfortable Aeron chairs) and is available on their website for $395 per unit.
I remember reading about a conceptual device under the same name like 4-5 years ago in a Popular Science (I think?) magazine. Really cool to see this come out.
but if this thing is running, won’t you hear the noise when you talk? i’d think that it would be pretty distracting, like whenever you would start talking, you’d hear some gibberish coming out of the box.
a few seconds ago i was excited to hear about this, but after listening to the gibberish, i think i’ll pass.