Eavesdropping on the Brain

Researchers at Columbia University have created artificial intelligence (AI) software that can broadcast aloud, in a computerized voice, what the human brain is'hearing.' "Our ultimate goal is to develop technologies that can decode the internal voice of a patient who is unable to speak, such that it can be understood by any listener," says neuroengineer Nima Mesgarani, senior author of the research study and a principal investigator at Columbia University. "In this study, we combined the state of the art in artificial intelligence with advanced speech processing algorithms to reconstruct sounds from the brain that were much more intelligible compared to previous research," says Columbia's Mesgarani. "This is a huge milestone." The Columbia researchers used experimental AI software trained to recognize digital representations of spoken sentences.