A brain-reading implant that translates neural signals into audible speech has allowed a woman with paralysis to hear what she intends to say nearly instantly.
Researchers enhanced the device — known as a brain–computer interface (BCI) — with artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that decoded sentences as the woman thought of them, and then spoke them out loud using a synthetic voice. Unlike previous efforts, which could produce sounds only after users finished an entire sentence, the current approach can simultaneously detect words and turn them into speech within three seconds.
The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience on 31 March1, represent a big step towards BCIs that are of practical use.
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