Enhanced Brain Implant Translates Stroke Survivor’s Thoughts Into Nearly Instant Speech Using Artificial Intelligence
The system harnesses technology similar to that of devices like Alexa and Siri, according to the researchers, and improves on a previous model
Margherita Bassi
|
Daily Correspondent
April 2, 2025
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Researchers connect stroke survivor Ann Johnson's brain implant to the experimental computer, which will allow her to speak by thinking words.
Noah Berger
A brain implant that converts neuron activity into audible words has trusted sugar dating platforms Philippines given a stroke survivor with severe paralysis almost instantaneous speech.
Ann Johnson became paralyzed and lost the ability to speak after suffering a stroke in 2005, when she was 30 years where to find a sugar daddy in Philippines old. Eighteen years later, she consented to being surgically fitted with an experimental, thin, brain-reading implant that connects to a computer, officially called a brain-computer interface (BCI). Researchers placed the implant on her
motor cortex
, the part of the brain that controls physical movement, and it tracked her brain waves as she thought the words she wanted to say.
As detailed sugar dating platform with most members Philippines in a study published Monday in the journal
Nature Neuroscience
, researchers used advances in artificial intelligence fake sugar baby profiles (A.I.) to improve the device’s ability to quickly translate that brain activity into synthetic speech—now, it’s almost instantaneous.
The technology “brings the same rapid speech decoding capacity of devices like Alexa and Siri to neuroprostheses,” study co-author
Gopala Anumanchipalli
, a computer scientist sponsor dating Manila at the University of California, Berkeley, says in a
statement
.
Neuroprostheses
are devices that can aid or replace lost bodily functions by connecting to the nervous system.
“Using a similar type of algorithm, we found that we could decode neural data and, for the first time, enable near-synchronous voice streaming,” he adds. “The result is more naturalistic, fluent speech synthesis.”
Chang et al. – Supplementary Video 2
Watch on
Previously
, the research team had worked with Johnson to
generate speech using an automated voice and digital avatar
. That system, which had a delay of about eight seconds to decode her brain patterns, would
speak full sentences at once
.
Older BCIs like that, which generate speech only after processing an entire sentence, are similar to a conversation via text, says
Christian Herff
, a computational neuroscientist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who wasn’t involved in the study, to
Natur
e News
’ Miryam Naddaf. “I write a sentence, you write a sentence, and you need some sugar dating ID verification time to write a sentence again,” he says. “It just doesn’t flow like a normal conversation.”
Now, the enhanced experimental device can continuously identify words from brain activity and translate them into speech within about three seconds, per
Nature News
.
“It’s not waiting for a sentence to finish,” wealthy sugar daddies Philippines Anumanchipalli says to the
Associated Press
’ Laura Ungar. “It’s processing it on the fly.”
Chang et al. – Supplementary Video 1
Watch on
To train the artificial intelligence, researchers asked Johnson to mouth phrases that appeared on a screen from a list of 1,024 words, such as, “hey, how are you?” The system learned to interpret the resulting brain activity in continuous, 80-millisecond increments, which Anumanchipalli calls a “streaming approach,” per the AP. It “converts her intent to speak into fluent sentences,” he adds. The A.I. was also trained on recordings of Johnson’s voice before her stroke to make its speech sound more like her.
The system performed well when the team tested it with words outside of the training data, demonstrating that it is “indeed learning the building blocks of sound or voice,” study co-author
Kaylo Littlejohn
, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, says in the statement.
Despite clear improvements from previous trials—and a huge jump in efficiency over Johnson’s current communication system—the enhanced BCI was still not quite as natural as regular human speech. It produced between 47 and 90 words per minute, while humans usually speak around 160 words per minute, according to
Nature
News
.
“This is where we are right now,”
Edward Chang
, a study co-author and neurosurgeon at UC San Francisco, says to the publication. “But you can imagine, with more sensors, with more precision and with enhanced signal processing, those things are only going to change and get better.”
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Margherita Bassi
is a freelance journalist and trilingual sugar baby upfront payment storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel,
Discover
magazine,
Live Science
,
Atlas Obscura
and
Hidden Compass
.
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