Your Web News in One Place

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

Sign up for GreenGeeks web hosting
April 3, 2020 01:00 pm

Scientists Develop AI That Can Turn Brain Activity Into Text

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Writing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, [researchers from the University of California, San Francisco] reveal how they developed their system by recruiting four participants who had electrode arrays implanted in their brain to monitor epileptic seizures. These participants were asked to read aloud from 50 set sentences multiple times, including "Tina Turner is a pop singer," and "Those thieves stole 30 jewels." The team tracked their neural activity while they were speaking. This data was then fed into a machine-learning algorithm, a type of artificial intelligence system that converted the brain activity data for each spoken sentence into a string of numbers. To make sure the numbers related only to aspects of speech, the system compared sounds predicted from small chunks of the brain activity data with actual recorded audio. The string of numbers was then fed into a second part of the system which converted it into a sequence of words. At first the system spat out nonsense sentences. But as the system compared each sequence of words with the sentences that were actually read aloud it improved, learning how the string of numbers related to words, and which words tend to follow each other. The team then tested the system, generating written text just from brain activity during speech. The system was not perfect, but for one participant just 3% of each sentence on average needed correcting -- "higher than the word error rate of 5% for professional human transcribers," the report says. "But, the team stress, unlike the latter, the algorithm only handles a small number of sentences." "The team also found that training the algorithm on one participant's data meant less training data was needed from the final user -- something that could make training less onerous for patients."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/VPDi_BVXuh8/scientists-develop-ai-that-can-turn-brain-activity-into-text

Share this article:    Share on Facebook
View Full Article

Slashdot

Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by Geeknet, Inc..

More About this Source Visit Slashdot