Meta’s AI can Head Your Brainwaves! Soon to Help Nonverbal People

The Meta AI researchers have developed AI by analyzing brainwaves

Researchers at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, are working on a new way to understand what's happening in people's minds.  Meta can scan a person's brainwaves to "hear" what someone else is saying to them. The researchers working in its AI lab have developed artificial intelligence that, by analyzing brainwaves, can "hear" what people are hearing. The Meta AI study looked at 169 healthy adult participants who heard stories and sentences read aloud, as scientists recorded their brain activity with various devices.

Meta's AI can head your brainwaves:

Meta researchers developed an AI model that can decode speech from non-invasive recordings of brain activity. The meta company behind Facebook has created an AI that could one day be used to help nonverbal people better communicate. Based on the electrical and magnetic activity in the participants' brains, they wanted the algorithm to "hear" or ascertain what the participants were listening to.

Most people may be familiar with the common types of brain scans like MRI, and CT, both of which produce detailed images of the brain. Unlike these current technologies where an electrode is put on the brain to be able to study the brain waves, Meta's research does not require opening up someone's brain. Researchers then fed that data into an AI model, hoping to find patterns.

The goal was to build an AI system that can decode brain responses to spoken stories. The AI can be trained to learn to decode noisy and variable recordings of brain activity from perceived speech. Decoding speech from brain activity has been a longstanding goal of neuroscientists and clinicians. So, the goal here is to delegate these two challenges to an AI system by learning to align representations of speech and representations of brain activity in response to speech.