A wearable device could make saying ‘Alexa, what time is it?’ aloud a thing of the past. An artificial intelligence (AI) neural interface called AlterEgo promises to allow users to silently communicate just by internally articulating words.
Sitting over the ear, the device facilitates daily life through live communication with the Internet. “It gives you the power of telepathy but only for the thoughts you want to share,” says AlterEgo’s chief executive Arnav Kapur, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kapur unveiled the device on 8 September.
The device does not read brain activity, but predicts what a wearer wants to say from signals in muscles used to speak, then sends audio information back into their ear.
The researchers say that their non-invasive technology could help people with motor neuron disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; ALS) and multiple sclerosis (MS) who have trouble speaking, but also want to make the devices commercially available for general use.
Read more | NATURE