How cool is that? Yeah you heard right! You can talk to your self and interact with the computer without really talking out aloud, infact without even talking but just THINKING! That’s how advanced AI is getting. Yes we all seem to adore those sci-fi movie settings and long for those devices. AI is getting them to reality.
This new device was developed in the MIT Labs, USA and goes by the name “Alter Ego”. It was develop by Arnav Kapur, Shreyas Kapur, Pattie Maes primarily.
AlterEgo is a wearable, silent speech system for silent and seamless natural language communication with computing devices and other people. AlterEgo seeks to augment human intelligence and make computing, the Internet, and machine intelligence a natural extension of the user’s own cognition by enabling a silent, discreet, and seamless conversation between person and machine. The wearable system reads electrical impulses from the surface of the skin in the lower face and neck that occur when a user is internally vocalizing words or phrases – without actual speech, voice, or discernible movements. The system is a private, personal, and seamless alternative to computing platforms used today. A user’s deliberate internal speech is characterized by neuromuscular signals in internal speech articulators that are captured by the AlterEgo system to reconstruct this speech. We use this to facilitate a novel user interface where a user can silently communicate in natural language and receive auditory output through bone conduction headphones, thereby enabling discreet, bi-directional interaction with a computing device, and providing a seamless form of intelligence augmentation.
Silent speech is different from either thinking of words or saying words out loud. Remember when you first learned to read? At first, you spoke the words you read out loud, but then you learned to voice them internally and silently. In order to then proceed to faster reading rates, you had to unlearn the “silent speaking” of the words you read. Silent speaking is a conscious effort to say a word, characterized by subtle movements of internal speech organs without actually voicing it. The process results in signals from your brain to your muscles which are picked up as neuromuscular signals and processed by our device.
This device cannot read your mind. The novelty of this system is that it reads signals from your facial and vocal cord muscles when you intentionally and silently voice words. The system does not have any direct and physical access to brain activity, and therefore cannot read a user’s thoughts.
Copyright: All information and images belong to MIT Labs and Arnav Kapur and fellow developers.
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