This Strange Headset Lets You Interact with Digital Devices Simply By Reading Your Mind
Researchers at MIT have developed a headset that can read the words you’re picturing in your mind so that you can interact with digital devices and virtual assistants, like Siri and Alexa, without actually speaking.
When you think about saying a word, your brain sends signals to your face muscles to prepare them for the upcoming vocalization. The device works by reading these so-called sub-vocalizations, otherwise known as “silent speech.”
Electrodes in the headset track these neuromuscular signals in the jaw and face. They are then deciphered by a machine-learning system—which has been taught to associate certain signals with certain words—and sent to a connected device as a set of instructions.
The MIT researchers presented a paper describing the device, known as AlterEgo, at the Association for Computing Machinery’s ACM Intelligent User Interface 2018 conference in Japan.
The motivation for creating AlterEgo was to develop an “intelligence-augmentation device,” according to Arnav Kapur, project lead researcher from the MIT Media Lab.
"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?" he said in a press release.
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AlterEgo also includes bone-conduction headphones that transmit sound through the bone of the skull, rather than through the ears, enabling the wearer to receive audio from a connected device, while still being able to hear the world around them.
Getting the device to understand speech involves teaching the machine-learning system to associate certain neuromuscular signals with certain words. So the team asked volunteers to wear the device while carrying out simple tasks that only required a limited vocabulary of around 20 words. For example, in one task, a user was asked to report chess moves by issuing subvocal commands.
At present, the prototype is still in its early stages, and so its comprehension is still limited. However, the more training it undergoes, the more advanced the system will become. The researchers hope that it will soon be able to understand full conversations.
Once this is achieved, the device could potentially be used by people to communicate with each other without speaking, using only the power of thought. Aside from consumer products, this could make the technology useful for communication in high-noise environments or situations where being silent is necessary. It may also be able to enable those who are unable to speak, for various medical reasons, to communicate.