Scientists may be able to interpret what someone is saying simply by analysing their brainwaves. This advance in neuroscience would help millions suffering from communication problems and neurological disorders. The artificial intelligence software can translate brainwaves into text. Algorithms analyse the brain activity and translates it in real time into sentences on a screen. The scientists are from the University of California. They say their algorithms have a 97 per cent translation accuracy rate. They are working hard to improve on this.

The scientists are at the early stages of machine-translating everything someone says. Their software matched frequently-repeated features of speech to parts and shapes of the mouth. These included elements of speech such as vowels, consonants and commands. The scientists used just 40 short and simple spoken sentences. The scientists said: "Although we should like the decoder to learn and exploit the regularities of the language, it remains to show how many data would be required to expand from our tiny languages to a more general form of English."