Reconstructing a Pink Floyd song from brain recordings is one thing, UCSF researchers using a brain implant and AI to give a paralyzed woman her voice back is another. Ann, a high school math teacher in Canada, had a stroke 18 years ago that changed her life forever. The team implanted 253 paper-thin rectangle electrodes onto the surface of her brain over areas critical to speech.
These electrodes then intercept the brain signals that would have gone to muscles in Ann’s lips, tongue, jaw, larynx, and her face, if not for the stroke. A cable connects the electrodes to several linked computers and AI algorithms trained to recognize her brain signals translate the sub-units of speech into spoken words. Speech Graphics developed an avatar that meshes with the signals and converts them into the movements on the animated face.
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The accuracy, speed and vocabulary are crucial. It’s what gives Ann the potential, in time, to communicate almost as fast as we do, and to have much more naturalistic and normal conversations,” said Sean Metzger, who developed the text decoder with Alex Silva, both graduate students in the joint Bioengineering Program at UC Berkeley and UCSF.
