Babble is a wireless box that duplicates and disassembles your voice before broadcasting it through a series of speakers to make phone conversations unintelligible to passers-by.

“It essentially turns one person’s voice into something that sounds like a small-group conversation,” said Bill DeKruif, at Sonare Technologies, Herman Miller’s research and design arm in Chicago. “Anyone standing just a few feet away can hear the person talking but is unable to discern the content of the conversation because it’s being muddled by the other voices.”

Babble will be introduced next month in Chicago at NeoCon, the office furniture trade show, and the device will hit store shelves in the summer.

A second generation Babble that protects face-to-face conversations in a similar fashion is in the works.

Via Orange Cone Freep. Picture from the PDF presentation.