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Thought to Speech: Vocalization for those who Can’t Speak
Technology is being developed to transform the thoughts of people who are unable to speak into synthetic voice. The technology would be useful to people who suffer from diseases like epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease.
Research is being actively pursued at a number of locations, including Columbia University, University of Bath, and UCSF Weill Institute for Neuroscience.
Nima Mesgarani, principal investigator at Columbia University, said that “our voices help connect us to our friends, family and the world around us, which is why losing the power of one’s voice due to injury or disease is so devastating but, with the right technology, these people’s thoughts could be decoded and understood by any listener. This would be a game changer. It would give anyone who has lost their ability to speak, whether through injury or disease, the renewed chance to connect to the world around them.”
Scott Wellington, Ph.D. researcher at the University of Bath, said that “in a nutshell, we’re hoping to create a technology that can take your imagined speech — that is, you think of a word or a sentence, without moving or speaking at all — and translate your brain signals into synthesized speech of that same word or sentence.”
Edward Chang, researcher at UCSF, said that “it’s been a longstanding goal of our lab to create technologies to restore communication for patients with severe speech disability. We want to create technologies that can reproduce speech directly from human brain activity. The neural code for vocal movements is partially shared across different individuals, and that an artificial vocal tract modeled on one person’s voice can be adapted to synthesize the speech from another person’s brain activity. This means that a speech decoder that’s trained in one person with intact speech could maybe someday act as a starting point for someone who has speech disability who could then learn to control the simulated vocal tract using their own brain activity.”
