Reviewed by James Ives, M.Psych. (Editor)Apr 25 2019
Scientists used brain signals recorded from epilepsy patients to program a computer to mimic natural speech--an advancement that could one day have a profound effect on the ability of certain patients to communicate. The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health's Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Technologies (BRAIN) Initiative.
"Speech is an amazing form of communication that has evolved over thousands of years to be very efficient," said Edward F. Chang, M.D., professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and senior author of this study published in Nature. "Many of us take for granted how easy it is to speak, which is why losing that ability can be so devastating. It is our hope that this approach will be helpful to people whose muscles enabling audible speech are paralyzed."
In this study, speech scientists and neurologists from UCSF recreated many vocal sounds with varying accuracy using brain signals recorded from epilepsy patients with normal speaking abilities. The patients were asked to speak full sentences, and the data obtained from brain scans was then used to drive computer-generated speech. Furthermore, simply miming the act of speaking provided sufficient information to the computer for it to recreate several of the same sounds.
The loss of the ability to speak can have devastating effects on patients whose facial, tongue, and larynx muscles have been paralyzed due to stroke or other neurological conditions. Technology has helped these patients to communicate through devices that translate head or eye movements into speech. Because these systems involve the selection of individual letters or whole words to build sentences, the speed at which they can operate is very limited. Instead of recreating sounds based on individual letters or words, the goal of this project was to synthesize the specific sounds used in natural speech.
More:
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20190425/Computer-program-mimics-natural-speech-using-brain-signals-from-epilepsy-patients.aspx
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