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A proof-of-concept neural brain implant providing speech
Focusing on sound production instead of word choice makes for a flexible system.
“Our main goal is creating a flexible speech neuroprosthesis that enables a patient with paralysis to speak as fluently as possible, managing their own cadence, and be more expressive by letting them modulate their intonation,” says Maitreyee Wairagkar, a neuroprosthetics researcher at UC Davis who led the study. To use an early version of Stavisky’s brain-to-text system, the patient had 256 microelectrodes implanted into his ventral precentral gyrus, an area of the brain responsible for controlling vocal tract muscles. To test the prosthesis’s performance, Wairagkar’s team first asked human listeners to match a recording of some synthesized speech by the T15 patient with one transcript from a set of six candidate sentences of similar length.
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