Neuroscientists Transform Brain Activity to Speech with AI

Artificial intelligence is enabling many scientific breakthroughs, especially in fields of study that generate high volumes of complex data such as neuroscience. As impossible as it may seem, neuroscientists are making strides in decoding neural activity into speech using artificial neural networks. Yesterday, the neuroscience team of Gopala K. Anumanchipalli, Josh Chartier, and Edward F. Chang of University of California San Francisco (UCSF) published in Nature their study using artificial intelligence and a state-of-the-art brain-machine interface to produce synthetic speech from brain recordings. The concept is relatively straightforward--record the brain activity and audio of participants while they are reading aloud in order to create a system that decodes brain signals for vocal tract movements, then synthesize speech from the decoded movements. The execution of the concept required sophisticated finessing of cutting-edge AI techniques and tools.