If I told you 10 years ago that you can type only using your imagination you might have said that It can only possible in Science Fiction. But the social giant Facebook has said on Tuesday that they moving closer to make it a reality. But Facebook is not alone Elon Musk’s Neuralink is also trying the same thing.
Back in 2017 in F8 developer conference, Facebook announced that it was working on a brain-computer interface (BCI) program that would focus on building a wearable device that would allow people type simply by imaging as if they were talking to themselves. Now finally after two years later, the company is sharing details about the project.
“The promise of AR lies in its ability to seamlessly connect people to the world that surrounds them — and to each other. Rather than looking down at a phone screen or breaking out a laptop, we can maintain eye contact and retrieve useful information and context without ever missing a beat,” Facebook said in a blog post.
Facebook has collaborated with the University of California and San Francisco (UCSF) to work on the project. Facebook has funded UCSF researchers to study whether electrodes placed in the brain could help us learn to “decode” speech from brainwaves in real-time. As a part of the research, the researchers three epilepsy patients who agreed to install temporary electrodes in their brain. The UCSF researchers said that after some training, the artificial intelligence-based system was able to identify the participants’ responses with an accuracy of 61 per cent as soon as they finished speaking.
Facebook wants to use the project to decode the brain activity of people who cannot communicate by speaking. The ultimate goal of the researchers is to reach a real-time decoding speed of 100 words per minute with a 1,000-word vocabulary and the word error rate of less than 17 per cent.
Facebook will invest more in this project. Facebook is hoping that in the coming 10 years they will be able to make this technology more mature.
