This Gadget Could Translate Thoughts Into Speech

Researchers at Columbia University have developed a gadget that is supposed to be a capable assistant for those who have suffered from their inability to speak: It can translate your thoughts into easy-to-understand speech.

On January 29, the journal Scientific Reports published a paper saying that the researchers at Columbia University created an algorithm called “vocoder” which can produce sounds similar to what we are speaking every day.

Mesgarani revealed that the algorithm was designed based on the technology Amazon and Apple had used for their products, Echo and Siri respectively. It is capable of offering verbal responses to each question.

Five epilepsy patients who underwent brain surgery were chosen to listen to others saying something. This aimed to check neural patterns in the brain activity of these patients. Those neural patterns, after that, we're used to instructing the vocoder how to turn brain waves or thoughts into speech.

To define how the vocoder operates, the researchers did a test to require these epilepsy patients to listen and repeat the numbers from 0 to 9. Meanwhile, they recorded the brain signals generated by the participants. After that, the algorithm received the recordings, and a specific neural network would analyze and handle the output.

Next, the speech was sent to 11 people to check its intelligibleness. The gadget has now had a lot of limitations; however, the researchers are planning to expand its functionalities.