A stroke survivor speaks again with the help of an experimental
brain-computer implant
[April 01, 2025]
By LAURA UNGAR
Scientists have developed a device that can translate thoughts about
speech into spoken words in real time.
Although it’s still experimental, they hope the brain-computer interface
could someday help give voice to those unable to speak.
A new study described testing the device on a 47-year-old woman with
quadriplegia who couldn’t speak for 18 years after a stroke. Doctors
implanted it in her brain during surgery as part of a clinical trial.
It “converts her intent to speak into fluent sentences,” said Gopala
Anumanchipalli, a co-author of the study published Monday in the journal
Nature Neuroscience.
Other brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, for speech typically have a
slight delay between thoughts of sentences and computerized
verbalization. Such delays can disrupt the natural flow of conversation,
potentially leading to miscommunication and frustration, researchers
said.
This is "a pretty big advance in our field,” said Jonathan Brumberg of
the Speech and Applied Neuroscience Lab at the University of Kansas, who
was not part of the study.
A team in California recorded the woman’s brain activity using
electrodes while she spoke sentences silently in her brain. The
scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her
injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. They trained
an AI model that translates neural activity into units of sound.
It works similarly to existing systems used to transcribe meetings or
phone calls in real time, said Anumanchipalli, of the University of
California, Berkeley.
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In this photo provided by researchers researchers at UCSF and UC
Berkeley, a UCSF clinical research coordinator connects a neural
data port into the head of Ann, a participant in a study on speech
neuroprostheses, in El Cerrito, Calif., on Monday, May 22, 2023.
(Noah Berger/UCSF, UC Berkeley via AP)
 The implant itself sits on the
speech center of the brain so that it’s listening in, and those
signals are translated to pieces of speech that make up sentences.
It’s a “streaming approach,” Anumanchipalli said, with each
80-millisecond chunk of speech – about half a syllable – sent into a
recorder.
“It’s not waiting for a sentence to finish,” Anumanchipalli said.
“It’s processing it on the fly.”
Decoding speech that quickly has the potential to keep up with the
fast pace of natural speech, said Brumberg. The use of voice
samples, he added, “would be a significant advance in the
naturalness of speech."
Though the work was partially funded by the National Institutes of
Health, Anumanchipalli said it wasn't affected by recent NIH
research cuts. More research is needed before the technology is
ready for wide use, but with “sustained investments," it could be
available to patients within a decade, he said.
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