American experts have made a woman who lost her speech after a stroke able to speak with the help of computer and AI. Photo: File
San Francisco: In the United States, experts from the University of California San Francisco and Berkeley have created a brain computer interface (BCI), thanks to which a woman who lost her speech after a stroke in the brain stem has been enabled to speak through a machine. This is also the first successful experience of making a patient able to speak in this severe stroke.
Thus, for the first time, conversations have been distilled by processing brain signals. This lady processes 80 words in a minute which is better than commercial technology. This is due to Artificial Intelligence (AI) which has made this work possible.
Edward Cheng, a UCSF-affiliated neuroscientist, has been working for more than a decade with research published in the weekly scientific journal Nature. It is expected to get FDA approval to allow computers to hear words spoken in the brain. However, Dr. Edward wants to make it completely natural and easy so that even the paralyzed can speak easily.
The same team had successfully demonstrated the conversion of word signals emerging in the human brain into text a few years ago. But now he has given voice to the same thought. In healthy individuals, words generated in the brain travel to the jaws and tongue. But it doesn’t change into sound due to the affected organs of people with paralysis. For this, different electrodes were placed on the woman’s head and neck, which, when matched with the computer’s database, were converted into a sentence and then the machine played it through the speaker.
But the most important role in this process is that of AI, which searches the brain signal and the words expressed in it. At present, more than 1000 words have been added to the woman’s vocabulary, which is enough for conversation. However, it will be further improved.
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