Innovative Speech Decoding Technology Gets National Spotlight

Recently, Jon Hamilton of NPR’s All Things Considered interviewed Dr. Edward Chang, one of the neurosurgeons and investigators involved in a study focused on decoding cortical activity into spoken words.

Currently, those who cannot produce speech rely upon technology that allows them to use eye gaze to produce synthesized speech one letter at a time. While this gives those who otherwise could not speak a voice, it is considerably slower than natural speech production.

In the current study, cortical electrodes gathered information as subjects read hundreds of sentences. The electrodes monitored various portions of the cortex involved in speech production. This information was processed and resulted in intelligible synthesized speech.

Review the full interview.

Reference

Anumanchipalli GK, Chartier J, Change E. (2019) Speech synthesis from neural decoding of spoken sentences. Nature568:493–498.