Resear­chers said they had succes­sfully recons­tructe­d 'synthe­tic' speech using an implan­t to scan brain signal­sPARIS: People unable to communicate due to injury or brain damage may one day speak again, after scientists on Wednesday unveiled a revolutionary implant that decodes words directly from a person’s thoughts. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, said they had successfully reconstructed “synthetic” speech using an implant to scan the brain signals of volunteers as they read several hundred sentences aloud. First, they asked participants to read out sentences as an implant on the brain surface monitored neural activity while the acoustic sound of the words was recorded. Finally, they crowd-sourced volunteers to identify words and sentences from the computerised speech. “We used sentences that are particularly geared towards covering all of the phonetic contexts of the English language,” he said.

Source: The Express Tribune April 24, 2019 17:15 UTC