For the first time, a brain implant has helped a bilingual person who is unable to articulate words to communicate in both of his languages. An artificial-intelligence (AI) system coupled to the brain implant decodes, in real time, what the individual is trying to say in either Spanish or English. The findings1, published on 20 May in Nature Biomedical Engineering, provide insights into how our brains process language, and could one day lead to long-lasting devices capable of restoring multilingual speech to people who can't communicate verbally. 'This new study is an important contribution for the emerging field of speech-restoration neuroprostheses,' says Sergey Stavisky, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study. Even though the study included only one participant and more work remains to be done, 'there's every reason to think that this strategy will work with higher accuracy in the future when combined with other recent...
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