AI can now translate thoughts to speech

An AI enabled system that reads our thoughts – would have made a wonderful plotline for a slapstick comedy film. But researchers from Columbia University were hard at work to make it a reality. The team thinks it’s a breakthrough as it may help those who cannot speak to communicate with the outside world. For the study, the team showed that by monitoring one's brain activity, an AI-enabled technology could reconstruct words a person hears with unprecedented clarityA voice synthesizer or vocoder was trained by the team to measure the brain activity patterns of epilepsy patients already undergoing surgery while those patients listened to sentences spoken by different people. Those patients listened to speakers reading digits between zero to nine while recording brain signals via the vocoder.They followed this with the use of a neural network, which is essentially a type of artificial intelligence for analyzing the signals, and gave robotic-sounding voices, according to the study published in the journal Scientific Reports."We found that people could understand and repeat the sounds about 75 percent of the time, which is well above and beyond any previous attempts," said Nima Mesgarani from the varsity.Mesgarani and his team planned to test more complicated words and to run the same tests on brain signals emitted when a person speaks or imagines speaking. Mesgarani called it a "game changer" that may give anyone who has lost their ability to speak a new chance to connect to the outside world.