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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In one demonstration, a former singer sang a musical scale. Afterward she cried tears of joy.
Brain signals from a 46-year-old man who lost his voice to A.L.S. were decoded by experimental brain implants and translated directly into intelligible speech. A 58-year-old woman, a trained singer, whose voice was gradually silenced by the disease, was able to sing a musical scale.
The new advances from researchers at the University of California, Davis, to be presented next week at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington, demonstrate that research into brain-computer interfaces are crossing from proof-of-concept demonstrations into everyday usefulness.
“This system, for the first time, is good enough,” said Cindy Chestek, a biomedical engineer at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the new work. “Good enough for real communication. It’s good enough to sing.”
For years, brain implants paired with increasingly powerful A.I. have been shown in remarkable case studies to restore a person’s ability to communicate, ask questions, even make jokes. The sense of connection that the technology provided to patients — who had lost control of the muscles that allowed them to speak, from A.L.S. or a stroke — could be profound, but was also halting, because systems translated signals first to text, then to speech. A person would attempt to speak, and electrodes surgically implanted in the brain would detect electrical signals. Software would decode those signals into phonemes, the sonic building blocks of words. Participants would watch words appear, one by one, on a screen, building a sentence. They would then trigger a cursor click to signal that they were done. Then, a computer-generated version of their voice would speak.
Research subjects could convey their thoughts in rich detail, but on a slight delay, which made it hard to truly join conversations. People often communicate with the rhythm, timing and emphasis of their speech, not by composing full responses and mentally hitting “send.”
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