Charge Your Phone With Your Voice

New technology could use speech to charge your phone, highlighting the potential for scavenged energy to extend mobile device battery life.

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South Korean researchers, using nanoscale zinc-oxide strands sandwiched between electrodes, are turning the vibrations of speech into electricity. The technology has a ways to go before providing any kind of useful charge to a phone -- it generated a measly 50 millivolts from speech in tests -- but it could eventually form part of a constellation of technologies that scavenge energy from the environment to keep batteries topped up.

"Sound power can be used for various novel applications including cellular phones that can be charged during conversations and sound-insulating walls near highways that generate electricity from the sound of passing vehicles," said Dr. Sang-Woo Kim, who developed the technology.

Quieter options are also in the works.

Scientists recently demonstrated a transparent screen coating that can captures solar energy to trickle-charge a smartphone, which could be commercialized within a year. Apple has filed patents for a solar-powered smartphone charging system as well.

Meanwhile, Nokia patented a mechanism to harvest kinetic energy, such as the bouncing of a phone in a pocket when someone is walking, for charging batteries.

While those inventions seem promising, advances in chip making and display technologies -- one of the biggest power hogs in a smartphone -- will probably do more to extend battery life for mobile devices in the short term. But tapping into free environmental energy has a promising future.

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