Reading accuracy increased to 80%.

Scientists say they have found a way to decipher brain signals to speech with 80% accuracy .

Paralyzed 27-year-old Englishman Erica Ramsey (eight years of paralysis after a car accident) electrodes were implanted into the brain to a depth of 6 mm in the brain, recording impulses from 41 neurons in the area responsible for speech generation (movement of the tongue and lips). The received signal was passed through a computer for decryption.

The experiment has been going on for three years. All this time, doctors have been working with programmers. The first forces Eric to imagine one of three simple words (“oh”, “ee” and “oo”), and also record the neurons involved. Programmers enter this information into a program that eventually learns to automatically recognize words. To date, recognition accuracy has reached 80%.

Now scientists are embarking on the second stage of the experiment. The recognized sounds will be sent to the speech synthesizer so that Eric can hear them and receive feedback in real time. Thus, he will be able to adjust the signals of his brain to increase the accuracy of recognition.
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The list of sounds, syllables and words will gradually increase. The process of self-study of the program and the person will occur simultaneously and, as experts hope, will go pretty quickly, and then after a few years, scientists will be able to finally hear the words that Eric has long wanted to tell them.

via New Scientist (subscription), copy