Scientists may soon be able to interpret what someone is saying simply analysing their brainwaves as they speak. This revolutionary advance neuroscience would help millions people who suffer communication problems and neurological disorders. The scientists developed a form artificial intelligence that can decode brainwaves and translate them text. Algorithms take the brain activity created as a person speaks and translates it in real time sentences on a screen. The scientists are the University of California, San Francisco. They say their algorithms have a 97 per cent translation accuracy rate but are working hard to improve this.
The scientists say they are the early stages being able to machine-translate everything someone says. The software used their experiments matched features speech that were repeated frequently to parts and shapes the mouth. These included elements English speech such as vowels, consonants and commands. The experiments were limited to around 40 short and simply-constructed spoken sentences. The scientists said: "Although we should like the decoder to learn and exploit the regularities the language, it remains to show how many data would be required to expand our tiny languages to a more general form English."
