Neural Implants Plus AI Turns Sentence-Length Thoughts to Text
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8162:
Neural implants plus AI turns sentence-length thoughts to text:
For people with limited use of their limbs, speech recognition can be critical for their ability to operate a computer. But for many, the same problems that limit limb motion affect the muscles that allow speech. That had made any form of communication a challenge, as physicist Stephen Hawking famously demonstrated. Ideally, we'd like to find a way to get upstream of any physical activity and identify ways of translating nerve impulses to speech.
Brain-computer interfaces were making impressive advances even before Elon Musk decided to get involved, but the problem of brain-to-text wasn't one of its successes. We've been able to recognize speech in the brain for a decade, but the accuracy and speed of this process are quite low. Now, some researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, are suggesting that the problem might be that we weren't thinking about the challenge in terms of the big-picture process of speaking. And they have a brain-to-speech system to back them up.
Joseph G. Makin, David A. Moses & Edward F. Chang. Machine translation of cortical activity to text with an encoder-decoder framework. Nature Neuroscience, 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s41593-020-0608-8
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