Interesting, but coming from the perspective of an audio engineer it all sounds a little too woo-woo without specifics. The $1200 price also seems absurd for something that appears to emit ultrasonic noise and scan for IoT devices. The fact it's taking pre-orders is also something of a red flag.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but these things strike me as money grabs that prey on peoples' understandable paranoia surrounding privacy. I'm happy to be convinced otherwise, but those were the first impressions of someone with a passable knowledge of how such devices ostensibly function. Unless it's doing something special I'm not aware of, a fairly basic filter on the microphone to limit any sounds outside of audible midrange would likely render these devices moot.
To be less of a cynical idgit, here's some cool future tech that does work--not great, I imagine, but getting better and could certainly be employed to keep the sounds you emit localized to a single point (controlling/defining the point might be tricky, and would require the listener to stay stock-still):
Spends version of a relatively simple arduino hack you can find on GitHub. Also easy to defeat but probably works most of the time. Some people can hear it though.
one wonders why an 'inaudible signal' would affect microphones that are designed for human voice frequencies.
unless of course that inaudible signal is actually a high power laser to destroy the offender.. but i'm not comfortable wearing laser goggles everywhere.
thought : a gadget that says words in my exact tone intonation and style incessantly while I talk to throw the speech-to-text systems off via garbage injuection -- boy that'd be obnoxious to compete with in a conversation.
tl;dr : sounds like a new high priced ultra-sonic mouse deterrent.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but these things strike me as money grabs that prey on peoples' understandable paranoia surrounding privacy. I'm happy to be convinced otherwise, but those were the first impressions of someone with a passable knowledge of how such devices ostensibly function. Unless it's doing something special I'm not aware of, a fairly basic filter on the microphone to limit any sounds outside of audible midrange would likely render these devices moot.