Artificial intelligence translates thoughts into text using brain implant

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “A decade after speech was first decoded from human brain signals, accuracy and speed remain far below that of natural speech,” states a paper detailing the research, published this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience. “Taking a cue from recent advances in machine translation, we trained a recurrent neural network to encode each sentence-length sequence of neural activity into an abstract representation, and then to decode this representation, word by word, into an English sentence.” The average active vocabulary of an English speaker is estimated to be around 20,000 words, meaning the system is a long way off being able to understand regular speech. The report cited technologies currently being developed by Elon Musk’s Neuralink startup and Facebook, who describe cyborg telepathy as “the next great wave in human-oriented computing”. open image in gallery Neuralink says learning to use its device is ‘like learning to touch type or play the piano’ The Royal Society estimated that such interfaces will be an “established option” for treating diseases like Alzheimer’s within two decades.