Japanese researchers have developed a new gadget to stop a conversation in seconds.

Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada developed a gun they call the Speech Jammer. It works by recording a target's speech and firing their words back at them in 0.2 of a second. This affects the brain's cognitive processes and causes the speaker to stutter before being completely silenced.

It forces the targets into vocal submission, the inventors say, and is accurate when fired from up to 30 meters away, according to The Daily Mail.

The device works more accurately on people who are reading aloud as opposed to spontaneous speech.

In a research paper published Feb. 28 at arXiv.org, Kurihara and Tsukada wrote, In general, human speech is jammed by giving back to the speakers their own utterances at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds. This effect can disturb people without any physical discomfort, and disappears immediately by stopping speaking.

In the paper, they suggest that the gun could be used to quiet noisy people speaking inappropriately in public places.

Software