Consumer & Gadgets

Team develops bracelet that jams microphones

The very topic of digital assistants and home smart devices sporting microphones and the potential for the outside world to listen in on recordings is not a comfortable one, to say the least. It's no longer a simple case ...

Machine learning & AI

New method can improve explosion detection

Computers can be trained to better detect distant nuclear detonations, chemical blasts and volcano eruptions by learning from artificial explosion signals, according to a new method devised by a University of Alaska Fairbanks ...

Consumer & Gadgets

Amazon digital assistant Alexa gets new skill: amnesia

Amazon on Wednesday added the ability to tell its Alexa digital assistant to forget what it has heard in a move that could assuage concerns about Echo devices remembering conversations.

Robotics

Teaching drones to hear screams from catastrophe victims

In a disaster, time is of the essence when searching for potential victims who may be difficult to find. Unmanned aerial vehicles make the perfect platform for state-of-the-art technology allowing emergency crews to find ...

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Microphone

A microphone (colloquially called a mic or mike; both pronounced /ˈmaɪk/) is an acoustic-to-electric transducer or sensor that converts sound into an electrical signal. In 1877, Emile Berliner invented the first microphone used as a telephone voice transmitter. Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, tape recorders, karaoke systems, hearing aids, motion picture production, live and recorded audio engineering, FRS radios, megaphones, in radio and television broadcasting and in computers for recording voice, speech recognition, VoIP, and for non-acoustic purposes such as ultrasonic checking or knock sensors.

Most microphones today use electromagnetic induction (dynamic microphone), capacitance change (condenser microphone), piezoelectric generation, or light modulation to produce an electrical voltage signal from mechanical vibration.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA