2022-Finland-Mobilus-Labs

JORDAN MCRAE: Thank you for having me. My name is Jordan McRae. I'm the CEO and founder of Mobilus Labs. My background is in ocean and space robotics from MIT. And with Mobilus Labs, we're reinventing the way that we communicate, and specifically with a conviction around voice. And we think there are many reasons for why this mission is warranted.

One of those reasons is because the paradigm that we have for voice communication, which is typically created by-- it's created 170 years ago by Alexander Graham Bell if you give him the credit-- this device stuck to the side of your face, next to your ear, and then something close to your mouth as possible, which sort of looks like what we have even today, where a supercomputer in our pocket is amazing technology today, our smartphone. And the least smart thing about it is the phone aspect and probably the least liked application of the device. So that warrants innovation in and of itself.

And then there's a hefty price tag to not paying attention to the way that we communicate. In industry, it costs $20 billion a year due to poor communication. And this is related to accidents, delays, poor handovers, and loss of equipment.

And so Mobilus has looked at all the various friction points in voice communication and ways in which we can alleviate those friction points. And we think there's sort of a third issue here, which is, with all of the AI and IoT platforms that we're developing, we talked a lot about digitization today, BIM, and digital twins. There's still this sort of what I call the last meter problem, which is all of that information tends to end up here in your pocket, where, for the boots on the ground that are going to be executing solutions, you want it here in their head and an ability for that pathway to be both directions.

So we've created a full communications platform with hardware and software. And one of the key aspects of that, I'm wearing today on my head, which is our bidirectional bone conduction technology. Now, this enables me to receive and transmit voice communication or any kind of audio communication through vibration on my skull rather than vibrations through the air through my ears.

So as a speaker, this device-- if I sort of become a head profile model here, this device allows me to receive vibrations from someone's talking to me. If you haven't had the experience of bone conduction, the first-time experience is almost as if though you have a voice inside your head. You don't feel the vibrations, but you hear this voice sort of just appear suddenly there.

And this has some key advantages. Either you get the situational awareness of being able to hear the environment around you through your ears. And on top of that, you have this layered communication that maintains the voice communication. Otherwise, if you're in a very noisy environment, you can defend your ears, or you can put earplugs in or ear protection on, and then you hear the voice from vibration even better because there's a sort of resonant effect.

In the other direction, we've got multiple patents on the bone conduction microphone that's integrated exactly into the same system. So right now as I'm speaking, I'm transmitting vibration out into the air. That's how you hear me. But I'm also transmitting vibrations through my jaw up to my skull, and the same device is sensitive enough to pick up those vibrations from my body. And so rather than picking up vibrations in the air, I isolate my voice directly through those mechanical vibrations. And so again, key performance within industrial noisy environments.

Now, we embed that technology into a full suite of hardware and software that sits on top of that. And leveraging us to take advantage of all the great advantages of cloud communication, this gives us performance advantages in terms of real-time transcription, translation, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, so again, not just human-to-human communication, but human-to-machine communication.

And what is going to be that interface that we choose for the future? Do we try to speak like machines? Or do we teach the machines to speak like us? And that's a fundamental question that we have at Mobilus. I'm going to go through here.

One of the case studies or key points-- we've got a great relationship with a company called Trimble in the United States and Microsoft, where the exclusive audio solution for the XR10 with Microsoft HoloLens 2 solution. So if you use that solution, you've probably used our bone conduction technology out in the field.

And then in the energy sector, we've just released the Gen2, which is what I'm wearing today, for generalized voice communication using handheld radios, smart devices, tablets. And I'll just give you a quick feeling for the performance. So this is in a refinery in California, and I'll play some audio samples of what it sounds like with just a normal microphone using some Harvard sentences to test the audio quality.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

- The birch canoe slid on the smooth planks.

JORDAN MCRAE: So that's about 110-dB--

- It's easy to tell the depth of a well.

JORDAN MCRAE: --background noise--

- These days--

JORDAN MCRAE: --that you hear.

- a-- chicken leg is a rare dish. Glue the sheet to the dark blue background.

JORDAN MCRAE: And so here is mobiWAN in that same environment captured exactly the same time.

- The birch canoe slid on the smooth planks. It's easy to tell the depth of a wall.

JORDAN MCRAE: And that's all through bone conduction--

- These days--

JORDAN MCRAE: --vibrations.

- --a chicken leg--

JORDAN MCRAE: Isolating the voice--

- --is a rare dish.

JORDAN MCRAE: --at the near end--

- Glue the sheets to the--

JORDAN MCRAE: --rather than trying--

- --dark blue background.

JORDAN MCRAE: --to remove the background noise--

- Rice is often served--

JORDAN MCRAE: --at the far end.

- --in round bowls.

[END PLAYBACK]

JORDAN MCRAE: And so, finally, we're here today. I have, I guess, two primary asks. One is allow me to put voices in your head. We have active-- we have a demo system out there for at lunch. So if you're willing and courageous enough, I'd be happy to show you how this technology works here today. And two, if you have any ideas, especially some of the representatives from the industrial sector, we'd love to learn more about how this can be used in the field and empower the boots on the ground to communicate better and safer. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]