Discussion
I'm not saying we should be building ultrasonic wearables that emit a string of wake words and nefarious voice prompts that can only be picked up by nearby smart devices, but that is totally within the realm of possibility.
@karlauerbach as I gather, embedded mics are more easily overloaded by ultrasonic sound simply because of how miniscule they are (seriously, these are surface mount devices with a tiny hole in the side). Regular mics have larger diaphragms that are harder to move with ultrasonics.
If you go far enough back, you'll find a project where Naomi Wu (@SexyCyborg) built a choker necklace out of ultrasonic transducers that jams nearby embedded microphones with white noise (external pro-grade mics unaffected).
Based on this project: https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/jammer/
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@phaysis First, once upon a time I thought I should extend the "TV B Gone" concept to create a widget that would go through all of the TV remote protocols and for each enter the child protection menus where it would disable Fox News, NewsMax, etc, and then would set a random password.
Second: Why would an ultrasonic string of words affect only local smart devices/microphones and not ones with normal desktop microphones (like the ones I use when recording interviews)? Is it simply that there is no smarts behind the latter and that many of us have high-frequency clipping filters?