This is Tech

Scientists at Texas Instruments have created a neckband called the Audeo that can interpret nerve signals to general voiceless speech. The New Scientist has posted a full article about it and posted a video demonstration on YouTube (embedded below).

This very early stage technology, and the system’s vocabulary is apparently limited to around 150 hundred words and phrases. Nonetheless, it is exciting to see advances in interfaces between the brain and computers. Being able to silently and motionlessly signal to a computer could make for some interesting applications. One application mentioned in the video is silently querying the Internet with questions and having them spoken back to you. Technologies like these can augment human intelligence. Imagine being able to query the world’s knowledge without being at a computer, or even needing to speak or move. In the same way that wearable cameras can give a user a photographic memory, an invisible connection to the Internet would give users enhanced knowledge.

The only criticism I have is that intercepting nerve signals seems like an over complicated means of decoding silent messages. The Audeo band is worn around the neck, which makes me wonder why it couldn’t just pick up subvocalized vibrations directly from the user’s vocal cords. I realize that speech recognition is tricky enough without trying to decode subvocalized vibrations, but the nerve signal methods sounds like it requires a fair about of self training to make it work, and could be overthinking the problem.

Read the whole article at The New Scientist, and check out the demo video below. If you can think of any interesting applications of this type of technology, let us know with a comment.