A new brain prosthesis can read out inner thoughts in real time, helping people with ALS and brain stem stroke communicate fast and comfortablyAmazing. Could be wrong some of the time:
The brain activation detected by these sensors is then fed into a machine-learning model to interpret which brain signals correspond to which sounds for an individual user. It then uses those data to predict which word the user is attempting to say.
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Using this new “inner speech” system, the participants needed only to think a sentence they wanted to say and it would appear on a screen in real time. While previous inner speech decoders were limited to only a handful of words, the new device allowed participants to draw from a dictionary of 125,000 words.
Still, way better than nothing.
This, of course, could be used for evil:
To ensure private thoughts remained private, the researchers implemented a code phrase: “chitty chitty bang bang.” When internally spoken by participants, this would prompt the BCI to start or stop transcribing.