As part of the course “Trends in Interactive Technologies” in the spring of 2019, I worked on a project investigating the impact that more realistic speech synthesis technologies might have on the world over the next few decades. As part of the project, I wrote a short science fiction story, and built a few electronic prototypes to accompany the narrative. The overarching story was one of a world where all speech is suspect.

Artefact 1

A digital, open access copy of “The Larynx - A Retrospective”, a short science-fiction story by first-time author Dara Esfahani.

Artefact 2

The Compass - a portable tool to indicate real or fake voices in the space around us. It works by vibrating more intensely when pointed at a source of speech that is more likely to be fake.

This is an image of the compass device, which is a black cylindrical hand-held device with a spout at the top out of which a key chain emerges