New technology that can read minds and turn thoughts into complete sentences with the help of AI is giving hope to people who can't speak. Researchers from the University of California say their technology is able to translate brain activity into English word by word with the help of machine learning. The technology could revolutionise the way people who can't speak or move are able to communicate, as it is more natural than existing tools, the team say. It has an accuracy rate of 97 per cent - more than twice as high as other brain-signal decoding devices and works by mapping activity of neurons to words. Translating neurons to words enables it to type word sequences on a computer interface in real time - which can then be read out by a synthetic voice.

People's interactions with machines, from robots that throw tantrums when they lose a colour-matching game against a human opponent to the bionic limbs that could give us extra abilities, are not just revealing more about how our brains are wired – they are also altering them. Emily Cross is a professor of social robotics at the University of Glasgow in Scotland who is examining the nature of human-robot relationships and what they can tell us about human cognition. She defines social robots as machines designed to engage with humans on a social level – from online chatbots to machines with a physical presence, for example, those that check people into hotel rooms. According to Prof. Cross, as robots can be programmed to perform and replicate specific behaviours, they make excellent tools for shedding light on how our brains work, unlike humans, whose behaviour varies. 'The central tenets to my questions are, can we use human-robot interaction to better understand the flexibility and fundamental mechanisms of social cognition and the human brain,' she said.