Scientists may be able to interpret what someone is saying by analysing their brainwaves. This could help millions suffering from communication problems and neurological disorders. Algorithms in the scientists' software can translate brainwaves into text on a screen in real time. The scientists are from the University of California. They say their algorithms are 97 per cent accurate at translating. They are working hard to improve this.
The scientists are in the early stages of their testing. Their software matched frequently-repeated features of speech to shapes of the mouth. These features included vowels, consonants and commands. The scientists used just 40 short and simple spoken sentences. They 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...to a more general form of English."