A volunteer with a chip implanted in their brain spoke on a phone using the power of thought
Neuralink, the company founded by Elon Musk, demonstrated the capabilities of talking on the phone, typing text on an iPhone, and giving commands to artificial intelligence using brain signals. One of the trial participants spoke on the phone with his wife using technology that converts his mentally spoken words into a synthetic voice.
Volunteer with brain chip implant spoke on the phone using the power of thought
Neuralink demonstrated new capabilities of its technology designed to help people with severe speech disorders communicate. Among them are phone conversations via brain signals, controlling the Grok artificial intelligence agent with silently spoken commands, and hands-free communication without manually launching the speech recognition system.
The new features were demonstrated with the help of one of the volunteer participants in the VOICE clinical trial. The goal of this study is to enable people who have lost the ability to speak to communicate once again.
All developments are based on an experimental brain-computer interface (BCI). This technology translates neural signals associated with a person's intention to speak into words. In this way, words spoken silently by the user can be expressed as text or device-generated speech.
One of the demonstrated features was the direct transmission of speech generated in this manner to a phone call on an iPhone. Instead of using a separate communication app, the system routes the synthesized speech into the telephone microphone's audio stream. As a result, the person on the other end of the call hears the voice generated by the device.
During the test, the volunteer participant spoke on the phone with his wife using this technology. Neuralink noted that their relationship had also once begun with phone conversations. Therefore, this demonstration held special significance for the couple.
Another feature allows controlling the Grok artificial intelligence agent through silently given commands. The user first silently says the phrase "Hello, Neuralink," and then expresses the task to be performed. After that, the agent independently carries out the corresponding instruction on the computer.
The company called this integration one of the first demonstrations showing how brain-computer interfaces can help humans interact more directly with artificial intelligence systems.
Neuralink has also developed a system that automatically detects speech activity through neural signals. It independently determines when the study participant is attempting to speak.
Previously, users had to press a button to start and stop recording the neural activity to be converted into speech. The new system automatically detects the attempt to speak and starts or stops the process of converting signals into words on its own.