Artificial Intelligence Decodes Speech from Brain Activity: Study

The technology, tested out on patients with epilepsy who already had electrodes implanted in their brains, is currently limited to 30–50 sentences.

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The idea of communicating through a brain-machine interface is something that has morphed from science-fiction to proof-of-concept in under two decades. A new study published in Nature Neuroscience claims to have taken the next small step by using artificial intelligence to interpret brain activity while individuals listened to sentences into text.

“We are not there yet but we think this could be the basis of a speech prosthesis,” coauthor Joseph Makin of the University of California, San Francisco tells The Guardian.

Each of the four participants used in the study has a history of epileptic seizures and already had electrodes implanted in their brains to monitor that activity. The researchers used those probes to monitor brain activity while 50 pre-determined sentences were read aloud, providing data for the neural network to decode. The sentences were widely varied in context and construct, including “Tina Turner is a ...

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Meet the Author

  • Lisa Winter

    Lisa Winter became social media editor for The Scientist in 2017. In addition to her duties on social media platforms, she also pens obituaries for the website. She graduated from Arizona State University, where she studied genetics, cell, and developmental biology.
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