[ExI] A New Brain Implant Turns Thoughts Into Text With 90 Percent Accuracy

[John Grigg]

"Texting might not be faster than speech, but for many of us it’s a natural
way to communicate.

Thanks to a new brain-computer interface (BCI), people with paralysis can
now do the same—with a twist. By imagining the motions of writing letters,
a man with spinal injury was able to translate thoughts into text, at a
speed that rivals thumb typing on a smartphone. At 90 characters per minute
and an accuracy of over 90 percent after autocorrect, the system leapfrogs
every record previously accomplished using neural implants.

The crux is an algorithm based on a popular and very powerful neural
network—recurrent neural network (RNN)—plus a few tricks from the machine
learning community. The result is a neural implant that uses AI to convert
electrical brain signals, generated as someone imagines handwriting into
text that’s displayed onto a computer in real time.

“This … could help restore communication in people who are severely
paralyzed, or ‘locked-in,’” said
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03506-2> study author Dr. Frank
Willett at Stanford’s Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory. “It
should help people express themselves and share their thoughts. It’s very
exciting.”


https://singularityhub.com/2021/05/18/a-new-brain-implant-turns-thoughts-into-text-with-90-percent-accuracy/
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