Scientists create speech from cerebral signals

One of the things that makes us human is our ability to communicate. However, a stroke or other medical disability can remove this ability without warning. Although Stephen Hawking managed to do great things with a computer-badisted voice, it took a lot of patience and technology to get there. Composing an e-mail or a speech synthesizer statement with the help of a tongue stick or flashing can be quite frustrating because most people can only manage a dozen words to the minute. The conventional speech has an average of about 150 words per minute. However, scientists recently reported in Nature that they were able to directly decode cerebral signals, which could pave the way for an entirely new world for people who need help to communicate.

The technology is only ready for the laboratory, but they claim to be able to produce generally intelligible sentences using this technique. Previous efforts have only succeeded in producing simple syllables, not whole sentences.

The researchers worked with five people who had electrodes implanted on the surface of the brain as part of the treatment for epilepsy. With the help of existing electrodes, scientists recorded activity as subjects read aloud. They also included data on the physiological production of sound during speech. In-depth learning correlated brain signals with vocal tract movements and could then badociate brain models with sounds.

The results are not perfect, but 70% of the sentences produced were understood by the test subjects – although they had to choose words from a list, not just listen arbitrarily. Oddly enough, although the results were not as good, the process worked even though people read while moving their lips without making real sounds.

It seems that the training is specific to the speaker. The newspaper even says "… in patients with severe paralysis … it can be very difficult to get training data." This could limit its usefulness for people who do not already know how to talk, which , badociated with work remains different to change anyone's life in the immediate future. However, this is a great first step to help people with speech disorders and, of course, for the dystopian future through this potential brain interface that will supplant the cell phone.

It's more scientific than the last time we saw a brainwave speech device. If you want to influence your brain waves instead of reading them, we have already experimented with that.