'First near-telepathic wearable' immediately sends internet into a panic about AI reading minds

The future is here - the "next chapter of human-computer interaction" no less - and it's embodied in an AI-powered headset (of sorts).

Tom's Hardware spotted the revelation of Alterego on X by the co-founders of the company Arnav Kapur (CEO) and Max Newlon (COO). As you can see, it's billed as the "world's first near-telepathic wearable that enables silent communication at the speed of thought".

The best way to swiftly grasp the concept is to watch the wearable - which is worn on the ears, and rests around the back of the head - in action. The wearer simply thinks and Alterego picks up those thoughts, in a fashion. However, it isn't actually reading your mind - the conclusion a fair few commenters on X (and elsewhere) immediately jumped to. I'll come back to how it works in a moment.

The possibilities are rather spectacular, although we can obviously add salt with this staged demo. You can dictate notes to your phone just by 'thinking' them, or type just by thinking - there's no need for a keyboard, virtual or physical. Or you can ask a question about something in your field of vision, getting a response from the AI that powers the wearable - a spoken reply delivered in your ear via a built-in speaker.

Most interestingly of all you can communicate 'telepathically' as shown in the demo, and think a sentence which is transmitted to another person also wearing an Alterego - which receives your utterance and plays it back via the speaker. In this way, you can hold a conversation - across a busy office, say - without having to open your mouth.

So, how does Alterego work under the hood? The central tech is called 'silent sense' and as the company describes it, the device "passively detects the downstream subtle signals your brain sends to your speech system, before words are spoken aloud".

That means all you have to do is think the words as if you're about to verbalize them, and they're picked up by the wearable.

The company makes it very clear that Alterego isn't reading your mind in any way, and will only pick up on mouthed words, or the neuromuscular signals in your face that happen when you verbalize words in your head - but don't actually speak them.

In terms of accessibility, this could give a voice back to those who aren't capable of speech.

This device is still in the early stages of development, of course, and all you can do right now is to sign up for updates on the progress of the wearable at the Alterego website. If anything comes of it, the device presents some intriguing possibilities for the future.

Skeptics and doubters

Doubters are pouring scorn on the idea, and it's certainly fair enough to be skeptical at this point - all we have is a vague, pre-rehearsed demo. There are questions as to precisely how this reads the signals in your jaw or face, and the extent to which you need to 'form' words physically - if you don't have to actually mouth the words, where exactly are the lines drawn?

In the demo, it looks like there's no facial movement at all, although notably, there's some blurring of the footage when the device is processing the user's input. Time will tell if this is being overly hyped, as ever, but it certainly looks promising.