You can NOT charge your phone with your voice, unless you are Chuck Norris

Sang-Woo Kim of Sungkyunkwan University found a way to convert noise to electricity, which can in turn be used to charge your cell phone. As usually when we come upon such stories, we pass it around the office, we have a good laugh and get done with it.

However we were amazed to see that this went all over the news as if it really was some kind of a breakthrough so we decided to make a few things clear here. We see you rising your eyebrows here and wonder how come we are not excited by the prospect of charging our phones by simply talking to them? Well, thats just because its impossible and its never going to happen as anyone with a basic understanding of physics will tell you.

For starters the device that converts sound waves to electricity has been around for ages its called "microphone". The problem is that it generates so little electricity that its not useful for anything but transmitting small amounts of data.

Then comes the source claiming that at the current state of their project they are producing 50 millivolts from 100 decibels of noise, but they promise to do better in the future. Do you know how much 100 decibels amount to? Lets just say that a gasoline engine chainsaw produces noise in the range of 90-112 decibels. Yes, 100dB is that loud. You Simply Cannot make this kind of Noise with your Mouth !!