For many people who are paralyzed
and unable to speak, signals of what they'd like to say hide in their brains.
No one has been able to decipher those signals directly. But three research
teams recently made progress in turning data from electrodes surgically placed
on the brain into computer-generated speech. Using computational models known
as neural networks, they reconstructed words and sentences that were, in some
cases, intelligible to human listeners.
Researchers relied on data from
five people with epilepsy. Their network analyzed recordings from the auditory
cortex (which is active during both speech and listening) as those patients
heard recordings of stories and people naming digits from zero to nine. The
computer then reconstructed spoken numbers from neural data alone; when the
computer spoke the numbers, a group of listeners named them with 75% accuracy.
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