🤖 Science & Emerging Tech

Researchers achieve a brain implant milestone

Friday, Jun 13

Image: UC Davis Health

As humanity gives robots voices, they appear to be doing the same for us.

For the first time, a brain implant has allowed a patient with a severe speech disability to speak expressively in real-time and even sing, effectively creating a new digital vocal tract, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Nature.

The new technology, designed by UC Davis researchers, uses a specially designed AI algorithm to instantaneously translate the patient’s brain activity into speech.

“The holy grail in speech BCIs”

Previous speech brain-computer implants (BCIs) have focused on translating brain waves into written words—a situation scientists liken to texting, given the delayed nature of conversation.

  • By comparison, UC Davis’ new tech is more like a voice call (near-instantaneous communication), which is the end goal for many speech BCI projects.
  • It’s also the first known BCI to reproduce not only a person’s intended words, but also features of natural speech like tone, pitch, and emphasis, which help to express meaning and emotion.

It’s been a breakthrough week: In a separate Nature Communications study published Tuesday, researchers uncovered key details about the complex process that grants axolotls, a species of aquatic salamander, the unique ability to regrow its limbs—with the goal of one day allowing humans to do the same (like Deadpool, but without the required torture to activate).

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