Dr. Eddie Chang

The way this worked was we trained this computer to recognize 50 words.

We started with a very small vocabulary that's expanding as we speak.

I think that this is just a matter of time before these vocabularies become much, much larger.

But we started with a 50 set of words.

We created essentially all the possible sentences that you could generate from those 50 words.

Why that was important was you can use all those possible sentences to create a computational model, computer model,

all the different word combinations to give different sentences, given those 50 words.

And then you can essentially do what we call autocorrect.

It's the same kind of thing that we do when you're texting, for example, you get the wrong letter in there, your phone actually knows, you know, because it's context what to correct it.

So because the decoding is not 100% correct all the time, in fact, it's far from that, it's really helpful to have these other features like autocorrect, the stuff that we use routinely now with texting that makes it correct and then updates it.

So it's a combination of a lot of things.

It's the AI that is translating those brain activity patterns, but it's also things that we've learned from speech and speech technologies that you put all together and then all of a sudden it starts to work.

That was the first time that someone was paralyzed and could create words and sentences that was just decoded from the brain activity.

It's a really interesting time right now.

The science has been going on for decades.

The work that we've done in this field that you call brain machine interface has been going on for a while.

And a lot of the early work was just trying to restore things like arm movement or having people or monkeys control a computer cursor, for example, on the screen.

That's been going on for decades.

What's been really new is that industry is now involved and some of this is now becoming commercialized and we're starting to see us now cross over to this field where it's no longer just research, that we're talking about medical products that are designed to be, you know,

surgically implanted.