Researchers enhanced the device ' known as a brain'computer interface (BCI) ' with artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that decoded sentences as the woman thought of them, and then spoke them out loud using a synthetic voice. Unlike previous efforts, which could produce sounds only after users finished an entire sentence, the current approach can simultaneously detect words and turn them into speech within three seconds. Older speech-generating BCIs are similar to 'a WhatsApp conversation', says Christian Herff, a computational neuroscientist at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, who was not involved with the work. 'I write a sentence, you write a sentence and you need some time to write a sentence again' It just doesn't flow like a normal conversation.' The study participant, Ann, lost her ability to speak after a stroke in her brainstem in 2005. Some 18 years later, she underwent a surgery to place a paper-thin rectangle containing 253 electrodes on the surface on her...
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