Don’t you just hate it when you have to take an important phone call and you’re surrounded by potential eavesdroppers? You either have to whisper or go outside to keep the conversation private, which is not exactly ideal.Now, a new gadget aims to fix this problem by muffling your voice and making you look like Bane in the process.

Hushme is a bizarre high-tech mask that blocks the sound of the wearer’s voice so that people nearby can’t hear what is being said. It connects to your phone via Bluetooth and comes with a pair of earbuds. When you get a private call, all you have to do is put the muzzle-like mask on and it will do the rest. The pair of thick cushy pads over your mouth do a good job of muffling your voice, but to ensure nothing gets through, Hushme also features external speakers that play a variety of sounds when you speak.

The Hushme mask, which comes in a variety of colors, can be worn around the neck, like a regular pair of earphones, and attaches in front of your mouth thanks to a couple of very powerful magnets. It’s not yet clear how comfortable speaking with this Bane-like mask over your mouth really is, or how effective its speech muffling capability is, so all we know so far is that it makes you look weird.

The sound options for covering your voice currently include wind, ocean, rain, birds, monkey, squirrel, R2D2, laughing Minion and Darth Vader breath, but new ones could be added in the future.

While Hushme is promoted as a phone call privacy protection device, you could always use it to protect your ears from loud mouth co-workers at the office. Just slap this baby over their mouths and you can get on with your work.

Advertised as the “world’s first voice mask for mobile phones”, Hushme was unveiled at CES, at the beginning of this year. It’s not commercially available yet, but its makers plan to start a crowdfunding campaign in May, and to start selling it by the end of the year. Engadget reports that it will cost around $200.

via Geekologie