This breakthrough raises significant privacy concerns about the potential misuse of such emerging technologies.A team of computer science researchers at Penn State has developed a startling new way to eavesdrop on phone calls remotely by decoding subtle vibrations emitted by a cellphone’s earpiece.
Using millimeter-wave radar combined with an AI speech recognition system, their setup can capture and transcribe conversations from up to 10 feet away with about 60% accuracy.
The research builds on a 2022 project where the team achieved up to 83% accuracy in recognizing 10 predefined words using a similar approach.
The new work extends this capability to continuous speech transcription, though the accuracy is lower due to the complexity of decoding noisy radar data.