HN Reader

Curious how much intentionality is required from the user to produce sounds. It would be unfortunate if this device just started firing off speech for what would otherwise be thoughts one would not say out loud. I suppose that depends on the mechanism required to activate the neurons to which the device is connected.

> In this second test, the word error rate was 43.75 percent, meaning participants identified a bit more than half of the recorded words correctly.

> [...]

> “We’re not at the point where it could be used in open-ended conversations. I think of this as a proof of concept,” [Sergey Stavisky, a neuroscientist at UC Davis and a senior author of the study] says.

The ability to produce sound without a use of a dictionary sounds awesome. It is an interesting result, a proof of concept as the author of the study says, but the title is editorialized at best and effectively clickbait at worst, because most readers will assume that "near instantaneous speech" means "clear intelligible speech and ability to communicate".

The main challenge appears to be the neural-computer interface - the electrodes. As the article states, there are several startups in this space all bottlenecked by the same constraint, and accurately translating neural impulses into digital (Or even analog) signals is the key to unlocking a whole arena of transhuman development.

Most such startups are scaling up the number of electrodes interfacing with the neurons to overcome this bottleneck, but I wonder if an unconventional approach could overcome the limit more gracefully. I may be a dreamer, but a high fidelity synthetic neural fiber is the holy grail here. I do remember reading people partially healed of paralysis due to spinal injury, because of electrical conduits that bridged the injured neural gap.

That's the plot of movies Upgrade (2018) and Rakka (2017).

I often wonder how such teams build their devices - I assume it requires quite a few pieces of equipment that can't be bought at a nearby shop. Are such devices ordered from some manufacturer or are they built in-house somehow?

Telepathy is on its way. Next step they just skip the conversion of brain signals to words and just directly send the signals to another brain. But I think some conversion/translation would still be necessary.

Cant wait for a man-choker that executes "I'm having costlier rice, check if glucose spike is lower than usual rice". Yes, both devices are outside my body.