Brain Implants That Help Paralyzed People Speak Just Broke New Records

They tested the system on volunteer Pat Bennett, the ALS patient, who is now 68 years old. In March 2022, a surgeon inserted four of these tiny sensors into Bennett’s cerebral cortex—the outermost layer of the brain. Thin wires connect the arrays to pedestals atop her head, which can be hooked up to a computer via cables.

With the help of the device, Bennett was able to communicate at an average rate of 62 words per minute. The BCI made mistakes 23.8 percent of the time on a 125,000-word vocabulary. The previous record was only 18 words per minute—a record established in 2021, when members of the Stanford teamdescribing a BCI that converted a paralyzed person’s imagined handwriting into text on a screen.

Like Stanford’s AI, the UCSF team’s algorithm was trained to recognize the smallest units of language, called phonemes, rather than whole words. Eventually, the software was able to translate Ann’s intended speech at a rate of 78 words per minute—far better than the 14 words per minute she was used to on her type-to-talk communication device. Its error rate was 4.

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