Mind-Reading Headset

When you read words, the muscles in your larynx, jaw and face are fluttering with quick, imperceptible movements, sounding out the words so you can actually "hear" them in your head. This kind of silent speech is called "subvocalization," and unless you're a speed-reader who has trained yourself out of this habit, you're doing it all day, every time you read or even imagine a word.

MIT researchers want to use subvocalizations to decode your internal monologue and translate it into digital commands, using a wearable "augmented intelligence" headset called AlterEgo

 

The researchers tested the prototype device in a study involving 10 participants and found that it transcribed internal vocalizations with 92 percent accuracy on average.

"The motivation for this was to build an IA device — an intelligence-augmentation device," Arnav Kapur, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab and lead author of a paper describing the device, said in the statement. "Our idea was: Could we have a computing platform that's more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways and that feels like an internal extension of our own cognition?"

how does it work?Let's say you want to ask AlterEgo what time it is. First, you think the word "time." As you do, muscles in your face and jaw make micro-movements to sound out the word in your head. Electrodes on the underside of the AlterEgo headset press against your face and record these movements, then transmit them to an external computer via Bluetooth. A neural network processes these signals the same way a speech-to-text program might, and responds by telling you the time — "10:45."

In another twist, AlterEgo includes no earbuds. Instead, a pair of "bone conduction headphones" resting against your head sends vibrations through your facial bones into your inner ear, effectively letting you hear AlterEgo's responses inside your head. The effect is a completely silent conversation between you and your computer — no need to pull out a phone or laptop.

An early test of the technology showed promising results, MIT said. In a small study, 10 volunteers read a list of 750 randomly ordered numerical digits to themselves while wearing AlterEgo headsets. According to the researchers, AlterEgo correctly interpreted which digits the participants were reading with an average accuracy of 92 percent.

taken from external source...