Spectre I is a portable audio security device that creates a 2m protection zone around you. It sends out signals that are inaudible to you but can be detected by a microphone. Through customization of the signals to match the human voice, your conversations are "overlayed" when a microphone receives them. It uses local processing to prevent nearby smartphones, smart speakers, and other devices from picking up your voice. Everything happens locally on the device — nothing is sent to the cloud.
It's unclear whether it performs the task or if it's illegal, similar to a phone jammer.
Phone jammers are illegal because they are broadcasting into regulated spectrum. There is no such spectrum regulation around audio transmissions. I will not say one way or another if this device actually works as adertised, but particularly if the signal is outside the range normally audible to people there should be nothing illegal about this device.
I'm with the sceptics, but also they don't show it in use. But from the product screenshot of the person hitting the button, it seems not to be wearable, so.....when would I use this? When I'm in a room that has a smart-speaker? So I go to a friends place for dinner and I put this device on the table so that my friends Alexa can't hear me.
Good thing I wore my tin-foil hat to dinner, but sadly, my friend didn't wear one, and now they can't get a timer for their cooking and the meal is ruined. Brilliant.
Assuming this is not a scam, my guess is that it emits sound above the Nyquist frequency of mic'ed devices with the hope that they lack a low-pass filter on the input of their ADC. Such devices would then suffer sample aliasing that would overlay the high frequency that is output by this device with whatever in-band audio that it intends to obscure. A cheap low-pass filter would defeat this and is likely there in any case in most mic'ed devices as the world has high frequency ambient noise.
> creates a 2m protection zone around you. It sends out signals that are inaudible to you but can be detected by a microphone
Plausible but anything inaudible to you and screwing with the remote is a software or hardware upgrade away. It’s hard to imagine a sw or hw bandpass filter doesn’t stop this. Also hard to imagine smart speakers aren’t doing this already to extract your voice in a noisy environment / personalize responses.
I’d wait for this to be independently verified and understand how they propose to find microphones. Maybe they’re looking for the Wi-Fi / BT signals the speakers are emitting but something like a local nanny cam there’s no way.
A microphone is using so little electricity / voltage that I’d be surprised if you can detect anything even right beside it. It’s also not going to be tied to any fingerprint you’re trying to transmit.
And also do be doing positioning requires multiple spatially separated receivers (nothing like LIDAR). And good luck separating out other much larger sources of EM noise.
I can't imagine that mics are going to be affected by anything that doesn't also seriously bother at least some animals, definitely not something I'd use outside of some ultra secure conference room or something.
How can it detect nearby microphones?
Also, seems like your voice would easily project farther than 2 meters, the "protection zone" of this device. That's not even the size of a room.