New System To Translate Brain Signals into Speech Developed

"Our voices help connect us to our friends, family and the world around us, which is why losing the power of one's voice due to injury or disease is so devastating," said Nima Mesgarani, of Columbia University in the US. We've shown that, with the right technology, these people's thoughts could be decoded and understood by any listener," said Mesgarani, a principal investigator of the study published in the journal Scientific Reports. Experts, trying to record and decode these patterns, see a future in which thoughts need not remain hidden inside the brain - but instead could be translated into verbal speech at will. Early efforts to decode brain signals by researchers focused on simple computer models that analysed spectrograms, which are visual representations of sound frequencies. However, because this approach has failed to produce anything resembling intelligible speech, the team turned instead to a vocoder, a computer algorithm that can synthesise speech after being trained on recordings of people talking.