New Tech Turns Imagined Sentences Into Real-Time Text
A new device is being tested that can gather data from your brain and predict the words you are attempting to say.
The sci-fi-like system relies on some of the same technology as the more common “attempted speech” devices. In both cases, they use sensors implanted in the brain’s motor cortex, an area responsible for sending motion commands to the vocal tract. Sensors can detect brain activation, which is then delivered into a machine-learning model that interprets which brain signals correspond to which sounds. That data is then used to predict the user’s attempted speech.
The motor cortex is not just activated when we try to speak; it also lights up when we imagine speech, such as during an inner monologue. The researchers of the latest tech were able to leverage this phenomenon to develop their breakthrough “inner speech” decoding device, the results of which were recently published in Cell.
The team behind the findings studied four individuals who previously had the sensors implanted in their brains. Using the new system, participants simply had to think of a sentence they wanted to say, and it would appear on a screen in real time.
In the past, speech decoders could make out a handful of words. The new device, however, can draw on a dictionary of 125,000 words.
“As researchers, our goal is to find a system that is comfortable [for the user] and ideally reaches a naturalistic ability,” said Erin Kunz, lead author and a postdoctoral researcher who is developing neural prostheses at Stanford University, per Scientific American.
Incredibly, the new device enables the study’s participants to communicate a conversational rate of roughly 120 to 150 words per minute, requiring no more effort than imagining what they wanted to say.
One issue with this type of technology is privacy. For most of us, our inner thoughts are something we want to keep to ourselves. To protect privacy during the study, researchers creatively implemented a code phrase: “chitty chitty bang bang.” When spoken internally, it would prompt the brain-computer interface to start or stop transcribing.