New Tech Converts Thoughts to Speech, Could Give Voice to the Voiceless [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

By Roni Dengler | April 24, 2019 3:37 pm

Throat cancer, stroke and paralysis can rob people’s voices and strip away their ability to speak. Now, researchers have developed a decoder that translates brain activity into a synthetic voice. The new technology is a significant step toward restoring lost speech.

“We want to create technologies that can reproduce speech directly from human brain activity,” Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California San Francisco, who led the new research, said in a press briefing. “This study provides a proof of principle that this is possible.”

Slow Synthesis
People who have lost the ability to speak currently rely on brain-computer interfaces or devices that track eye or head movements to communicate. The late physicist Stephen Hawking, for example, used his cheek muscle to control a cursor that would slowly spell out words.

These technologies move a cursor to spell out words letter by letter. Though these tools enable communication, they are slow, stringing together five to 10 words a minute. But people talk much faster — human speech clips along at 120 to 150 words per minute. Chang and colleagues wanted to create a device that could speed up communication.

More:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2019/04/24/convert-brain-activity-to-speech-electrodes-algorithm/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20DiscoverMindBrain%20%28Discover%20Mind%20%26%20Brain%29#.XMFW7OhKjIU