ReVoice - Design Fiction

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. The prototypes and artefacts are included below.

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 ReVoice finger-based controller, meant to control Fluence speech synthesis systems.

This is an image of a prototype of ReVoice. This is a blac cuboidal controller (of the size of a small matchbox) that is clipped onto a person's hand using an attached clip.

Artefact 3

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