An AI Can Decode Speech From Brain Activity With Surprising Accuracy - AI Summary

The AI's "performance was above what many people thought was possible at this stage," says Giovanni Di Liberto, a computer scientist at Trinity College Dublin who was not involved in the research. Developed at the parent company of Facebook, Meta, the AI could eventually be used to help thousands of people around the world unable to communicate through speech, typing or gestures, researchers report August 25 at arXiv.org. This new approach "could provide a viable path to help patients with communication deficits … without the use of invasive methods," says neuroscientist Jean-Rémi King, a Meta AI researcher currently at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In these databases, participants listened to various stories and sentences from, for example, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland while the people's brains were scanned using either magnetoencephalography or electroencephalography. For it to become a meaningful communication tool, scientists will need to learn how to decrypt from brain activity what these patients intend on saying, including expressions of hunger, discomfort or a simple "yes" or "no."