People robbed of the ability to talk due to a stroke or another medical condition might soon have real hope of regaining a voice thanks to technology that harnesses brain activity to produce synthesized speech, researchers said on Wednesday.
Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), implanted electrodes into the brains of volunteers and decoded signals in cerebral speech centers to guide a computer-simulated version of their vocal tract — lips, jaw, tongue and larynx — to generate speech through a synthesizer.
This speech was mostly intelligible, although somewhat slurred in parts, raising hope among the researchers that with some improvements a clinically viable device could be developed for patients with speech loss.
“We were shocked when we first heard the results — we couldn’t believe our ears. It was incredibly exciting that a lot of the aspects of real speech were present in the output from the synthesizer,” said UCSF doctoral student Josh Chartier, a coauthor of the study that was published in the journal Nature.
“Clearly, there is more work to get this to be more natural and intelligible, but we were very impressed by how much can be decoded from brain activity,” Chartier said.
Stroke, ailments such as cerebral palsy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis, brain injuries and cancer sometimes take away a person’s ability to speak.
Some people use devices that track eye or residual facial muscle movements to laboriously spell out words letter by letter, but producing text or synthesized speech this way is slow, typically no more than 10 words per minute.
The five volunteers, all capable of speaking, were given the opportunity to take part because they were epilepsy patients who already were going to have electrodes temporarily implanted in their brains to map the source of their seizures before neurosurgery.
The volunteers read aloud while activity in brain regions involved in language production was tracked.
The researchers discerned the vocal tract movements needed to produce the speech, and created a “virtual vocal tract” for each participant that could be controlled by their brain activity and produce synthesized speech.
“We hope that these findings give hope to people with conditions that prevent them from expressing themselves that one day we will be able to restore the ability to communicate, which is such a fundamental part of who we are as humans,” Chartier added.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion