You’ve probably heard of noise-canceling ear buds, but one company from Japan has announced the noise-canceling microphone! The “Wearphone” reportedly lowers the user’s voice by 10 to 20 decibels, so other people are that much less likely to overhear you talking dirty to chatbots. What an innovation!

…except something like this already exists. Yes, even wireless versions.

The innovation here is that the Wearphone looks like it’d be light enough to wear (maybe), instead of being held up to the user’s mouth like a handheld mike. And it only looks a little like a piece of bondage gear.

The other innovation is that it’s more expensive ($450 with a preorder discount or $500 without, whereas the stenomasks I found with a quick search were in the $200 to $400 range). And there’s a subscription, $19 a month, that adds a layer of AI voice recognition instead of just passing the audio to the chatbot or phone app you’re using.

If there’s an on-off button for the noise cancellation that lets you talk to people face-to-face without clumsily pulling the thing off and holding it, it isn’t showing in the pictures I’ve seen. (Inb4 that $19 subscription includes the ability to turn off noise cancellation with a phone app…)

Via Bruce Sterling.