Author: Laura Sanders / Source: Science News
To communicate, people unable to talk often rely on small eye movements to spell out words, a painstakingly slow process.
Now, using signals picked up by a brain implant, scientists have pulled entire sentences from the brain.Some of these reconstructed words, spoken aloud by a virtual vocal cord, are a little garbled. But overall, the sentences are understandable, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco report in the April 25 Nature.
Creating the audible synthetic sentences required years of analysis after brain signals were recorded, and the technique is not ready to be used outside of a lab. Still, the work shows “that just using the brain, it is possible to decode speech,” says UCSF speech scientist Gopala Anumanchipalli.
The technology described in the new study holds promise for ultimately restoring people’s abilities to speak fluently, says Frank Guenther, a speech neuroscientist at Boston University. “It’s hard to overstate the importance of that to these people…. It’s incredibly isolating and practically nightmarish to not be able to communicate needs or socially connect.”
Existing speech aids that rely on spelling words are tedious, often producing about 10 words a minute. Earlier studies have used brain signals to decode smaller bits of speech, such as vowels or words, but with a more limited vocabulary than the current work.
Along with neurosurgeon Edward Chang and bioengineer Josh…
The post A neural implant can translate brain activity into sentences appeared first on FeedBox.