Brain-activated speech synthesis

I remember an old Star Trek movie where severely debilitated people without functional vocal chords could readily speak to each other by merely thinking their sentences.  Recent research is bringing us closer to having such a capability.  The article A Wireless Brain-Machine Interface for Real-Time Speech Synthesis in the current issue of Plos One lays out the progress.

Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) involving electrodes implanted into the human cerebral cortex have recently been developed in an attempt to restore function to profoundly paralyzed individuals. — In the current study we use a novel approach to speech restoration in which we decode continuous auditory parameters for a real-time speech synthesizer from neuronal activity in motor cortex during attempted speech. —  Neural signals recorded by a Neurotrophic Electrode implanted in a speech-related region of the left precentral gyrus of a human volunteer suffering from locked-in syndrome, characterized by near-total paralysis with spared cognition, were transmitted wirelessly across the scalp and used to drive a speech synthesizer. A Kalman filter-based decoder translated the neural signals generated during attempted speech into continuous parameters for controlling a synthesizer that provided immediate (within 50 ms) auditory feedback of the decoded sound. Accuracy of the volunteer’s vowel productions with the synthesizer improved quickly with practice, with a 25% improvement in average hit rate (from 45% to 70%) and 46% decrease in average endpoint error from the first to the last block of a three-vowel task.”

I take this to mean that machine-training is necessary and that generating normal fluent speech is not yet possible.  My impression is that a lot more needs to be done to understand and encode the relationships between neural events and continuous speech.  This may take some time.  Computer speech recognition research started in the 1950s and decent recognition of continuous speech was not achieved until around 2000.  The authors conclude “Our results support the feasibility of neural prostheses that may have the potential to provide near-conversational synthetic speech output for individuals with severely impaired speech motor control. They also provide an initial glimpse into the functional properties of neurons in speech motor cortical areas.”

I speculate that if and as this technology is perfected it would have a number of additional applications for normal non-debilitated people including:

·         Telephone calls without talking aloud for privacy or in noisy places or so as not to disturb others,

·         Rapid writing or recording of thoughts for people who can think faster than they can talk,

·         Private voice conversations not obvious to those you are with, even sneakier than text messaging can be, and

·         Controlling machinery or even driving a car with just internally vocalized thoughts.

In the future the situation could get even more extreme when electronics also can short-circuit the human hearing apparatus and thoughts can fly electronically from one brain into another.  I don’t want to go there for now.  If I live as long as I want to, however, there will surely come a point when I will have to decide whether or not to have a brain implant for voiceless speech synthesis.

About Vince Giuliano

Being a follower, connoisseur, and interpreter of longevity research is my latest career, since 2007. I believe I am unique among the researchers and writers in the aging sciences community in one critical respect. That is, I personally practice the anti-aging interventions that I preach and that has kept me healthy, young, active and highly involved at my age, now 93. I am as productive as I was at age 45. I don’t know of anybody else active in that community in my age bracket. In particular, I have focused on the importance of controlling chronic inflammation for healthy aging, and have written a number of articles on that subject in this blog. In 2014, I created a dietary supplement to further this objective. In 2019, two family colleagues and I started up Synergy Bioherbals, a dietary supplement company that is now selling this product. In earlier reincarnations of my career. I was Founding Dean of a graduate school and a full University Professor at the State University of New York, a senior consultant working in a variety of fields at Arthur D. Little, Inc., Chief Scientist and C00 of Mirror Systems, a software company, and an international Internet consultant. I got off the ground with one of the earliest PhD's from Harvard in a field later to become known as computer science. Because there was no academic field of computer science at the time, to get through I had to qualify myself in hard sciences, so my studies focused heavily on quantum physics. In various ways I contributed to the Computer Revolution starting in the 1950s and the Internet Revolution starting in the late 1980s. I am now engaged in doing the same for The Longevity Revolution. I have published something like 200 books and papers as well as over 430 substantive.entries in this blog, and have enjoyed various periods of notoriety. If you do a Google search on Vincent E. Giuliano, most if not all of the entries on the first few pages that come up will be ones relating to me. I have a general writings site at www.vincegiuliano.com and an extensive site of my art at www.giulianoart.com. Please note that I have recently changed my mailbox to vegiuliano@agingsciences.com.
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