clhs sciblog

A milestone has recently been reached by a team of scientists. Their goal is to let people who are unable to speak because of accidents or diseases speak in real time. Through an implant that changes neural signals to modified FM radio signals and eventually to synthetic speech, a person can “say” something in fewer than 50 milliseconds. That is about as long as it takes a person to speak. While only able to do vowel sounds, the group is hoping they will be able to speak consonant sounds down the line. You can read more here.

It is amazing to see how far technology has gone. We are able to use our knowledge of radio, synthesizers, and many other technologies to allow people to do something otherwise impossible: have the ability to speak. They would be able to go from one word a minute to being able to carry out a conversation. Technology similar to this one could probably help many other medical problems. There seem to be few problems technology cannot solve.