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posted by martyb on Thursday January 31 2019, @01:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the NOW-your-talking! dept.

Engineers translate brain signals directly into speech

In a scientific first, Columbia [University] neuroengineers have created a system that translates thought into intelligible, recognizable speech. By monitoring someone's brain activity, the technology can reconstruct the words a person hears with unprecedented clarity. This breakthrough, which harnesses the power of speech synthesizers and artificial intelligence, could lead to new ways for computers to communicate directly with the brain. It also lays the groundwork for helping people who cannot speak, such as those living with as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or recovering from stroke, regain their ability to communicate with the outside world.

[...] Decades of research has shown that when people speak -- or even imagine speaking -- telltale patterns of activity appear in their brain. Distinct (but recognizable) pattern of signals also emerge when we listen to someone speak, or imagine listening. Experts, trying to record and decode these patterns, see a future in which thoughts need not remain hidden inside the brain -- but instead could be translated into verbal speech at will.

[...] [The] researchers asked [epilepsy] patients to listen to speakers reciting digits between 0 to 9, while recording brain signals that could then be run through the vocoder. The sound produced by the vocoder in response to those signals was analyzed and cleaned up by neural networks, a type of artificial intelligence that mimics the structure of neurons in the biological brain.

The end result was a robotic-sounding voice reciting a sequence of numbers. To test the accuracy of the recording, Dr. [Nima] Mesgarani and his team tasked individuals to listen to the recording and report what they heard. "We found that people could understand and repeat the sounds about 75% of the time, which is well above and beyond any previous attempts," said Dr. Mesgarani. The improvement in intelligibility was especially evident when comparing the new recordings to the earlier, spectrogram-based attempts. "The sensitive vocoder and powerful neural networks represented the sounds the patients had originally listened to with surprising accuracy."

Dr. Mesgarani and his team plan to test more complicated words and sentences next, and they want to run the same tests on brain signals emitted when a person speaks or imagines speaking. Ultimately, they hope their system could be part of an implant, similar to those worn by some epilepsy patients, that translates the wearer's thoughts directly into words.

Towards reconstructing intelligible speech from the human auditory cortex (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-37359-z) (DX)


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:06PM (3 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:06PM (#794547)

    The effect of making all auditory thoughts public will be something like this:

    "My god, Vanessa has a fabulous body. I'll bet she shags like a minx. How do I tell them that because of the unfreezing process I have no inner monologue? ... I hope I didn't say that out loud just now."

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:38PM (2 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:38PM (#794552) Journal

    Reminds me of a couple of stories about telepathy. If everyone around you can hear your thoughts, society will definitely have to change.

    In a world where some (or all of us?) communicate via computers monitoring our brains, society will again have to change. It could get very interesting, very quickly. Do you think they can hire enough Secret Service agents to individually check on every person who thinks, "President Whosit should be shot!"

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by Thexalon on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:04PM

      by Thexalon (636) on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:04PM (#794587)

      Of course, it could be fun to have something like this in political debates:

      Morbo: "Morbo demands an answer to the following question. If you saw a delicious candy in the hands of a small child. Would you seize and consume it?"
      John Jackson: "Unthinkable."
      Jack Johnson: "I wouldn't think of it."
      Morbo: "What about you Mr. Nixon? I remind you. You are under of a truth-o-scope."
      Nixon: "Question is vague. You don't say what kind of candy and whether anyone is watching. In any case I certainly wouldn't harm the child." [truth-o-scope goes wild]

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday January 31 2019, @09:04PM

      by krishnoid (1156) on Thursday January 31 2019, @09:04PM (#794707)

      The Secret Service was planning on getting around to it, but then got a last-minute report from the CIA that they were planning on disposing of Whosit and replacing him with someone more friendly to US interests anyway. So they're off the hook and can keep officially checking the supply chain on all those hamburgers the White House is serving. I hear they're slowly converging on what constitutes a 'hazardous substance' in fast food.