New AI system can read your mind and thought and convert them to sentences
By: Team Ifairer | Posted: 02-04-2020
Heart It
A new artificial intelligence system developed by researchers has proved capable of reading the thoughts in the minds of people, and converting them into sentences. Although the prototype AI system was developed under controlled conditions, the researchers who created the project believe that with ample training of the machine learning algorithms, such a tool can be used to help individuals with speech impairments and other physical constraints to express themselves, which would make a landmark achievement in healthcare technology research. The project was undertaken by Prof. Dr. Joseph Makin and his team from University of California, San Francisco.
To create the ML model, the researchers had four participants read aloud a set of 50 sentences while connected to brain signal-reading electrodes, and tracked and recorded the neural activity in the individuals when doing this. To use this data by breaking it down into segmented parts, the algorithms then broke down the information into a string of numbers, which would represent specific words and help future algorithms understand the order of words that occur in grammatically correct sentences. It took quite a while, but over time, the algorithms started improving in terms of their general contextual awareness as to which sequence of words actually make sense, and which do not.
Over time, the system seemingly made quite a few rather amusing mistakes. Among them was a sentence that read, "Those musicians harmonise marvellously", which was misinterpreted to "The spinach was a famous singer". A second sentence, which actually read "A roll of wire lay near the wall", was interpreted as "Will robin wear a yellow lily". As revealed by The Guardian, these sentences do show that such a brain-to-speech system has quite some way to go before being implemented professionally, but irrespective of the mistakes, show immense promise in professional applications.