Looking To The Future- Thought to Speech

 

The future of science advancements is endless. In this video Dr. Ted Conway discusses the possibility of thought to speech. One of the really interesting areas of research in biomedical engineering is thought to speech. The concept of thought to speech is fairly straightforward, the execution to make this a reality is a little more complicated.

  1. Firstly, we need to understand how an idea that we have develops into a thought that is then transferred to the motor cortex of the brain.

  2. Secondly, we need to understand how the motor cortex actually controls the vocal folds in your voice box in order for you to actually speak.

With our current state of technology if we were developing a thought to speech device, we could link the brain to a machine, through a computer, using what's called electroencephalography (EEG). We've all seen the EEG caps that have the sensors that are surrounding the head, and they actually monitor our brainwaves. The physical structure of the device could be something as simple as a cell phone.

If thought to speech technology is successful, we should be able to provide tools for those who either have no speech or limited speech capability to express their thoughts and ideas in an articulate way and will be able to communicate with their family, their friends and potential employers.

How far off is thought to speech. It could be something as close as within the next five years. It could be 20 years out. We don't know what we don't know, and that's the real challenge.

"If thought to speech technology is successful, we should be able to provide tools for those who either have no speech or limited speech capability to express their thoughts and ideas in an articulate way"