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Speaking up on Google electronic throat tattoo device

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WWED: What would Edison do?

What would the inventor whose patents made so much of modern life possible have to say about this development:

A Google-owned company has just filed for a patent for a stick-on temporary neck tattoo, a kind of electronic Band-Aid, that would let you control your phone, tablet, games — pretty much any up-to-date electronic device — with voice commands. No more tapping instructions on a tiny keyboard. With this talk tattoo, you wouldn’t even have to know how to read or write — just how to speak.

It may never make the market, but Motorola Mobility’s patent application is for a “an electronic skin tattoo capable of being applied to a throat region of the body.” No earpiece, no Google Glass necessary. It would have its own mini-microphone and its own nano power source.

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I’m already wondering whether the most effective “command voice” when dealing with electronic servants is a friendly, Siri-like tone or a James Earl Jones/Darth Vader voice of power.

There’s real lifesaving potential here that I haven’t heard anyone mention. You’ve seen those “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” ads for devices that summon help? This simple patch on the throat could allow an elderly or sickly person, someone immobilized in a fall, to call for help using nothing more than their voice.

Yet as with all devices that are supposed to be about making your life easier, this one will have its complications.

The patent application blue-skys that this would also have a built-in lie detector. Someone who is “more nervous or engaging in speaking falsehoods may exhibit different galvanic skin response than a more confident, truth-telling individual.”

So while you’re using your Google tatt to order your smartphone to switch on the oven to heat the mac and cheese before you get home, someone else — maybe someone who’s paid good money to hook into the electro-tattoo network — is, unbeknown to you, running an app on your veracity.

Or maybe some medical firm has also bought into the system and is using your easy, hands-free techno tattoo to monitor whether you may be developing a fever, or your lung functioning looks compromised or perhaps your heart is racing, and how much you’ve been drinking this evening. That could save your life — or it could raise the cost of your insurance.

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It’s puzzling how much of a storm we raise about government monitoring of emails or tracking of phone calls, but how much information we could be willingly forking over simply in exchange for the convenience of, in this case, speaking a command rather than having to go to the bother of tapping it on a keypad or dialing a phone number.

One thing’s for sure: It could forever alter the meaning of “pain in the neck.”

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