A new device that ‘reads’ a person’s mind can turn their thoughts into speech.
A team of engineers from the University of California invented a breakthrough brain-computer interface (BCI) system with electrodes that get adhered to a person’s scalp to measure brain activity and brainwaves.
The brainwaves are analyzed and then converted into audible speech by a computer, which then translates them to spoken words read aloud by AI.
The researchers believe the new technology could restore paralyzed people’s ability to communicate by converting the brain activity from the motor cortex into audible speech.
The motor cortex is instrumental in controlling speech, and signals are generated even when a person has lost the ability to speak.
Researchers employed advanced AI models to capture brain signals in that area and convert them to sound in about one second, allowing continuous speech output without delays.
They tested the BCI on a woman named Ann, who has severe paralysis and cannot speak. She had participated in a previous study by the same team, but their system at that time resulted in a lag-time of eight seconds.
Kaylo Littlejohn, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and co-leader of the study, said: ‘We wanted to see if we could generalize to the unseen words and really decode Ann’s patterns of speaking.
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