Brain implants and artificial intelligence helped a person say a few words, but more importantly, pronounce them in two languages, English and Spanish.
For his native language, Spanish, it was necessary to train the system to record the activity of the neurons corresponding to each of the 200 words the patient had to try to pronounce – the man, who is now in his 30s, lost the ability to speak more than 10 years ago following a seizure. Hearty.
The system then had to display these words on the screen and try to predict the most likely sentences that the patient was trying to say.
From the brain to a bilingual communication system?
Previously, the same system was trained to recognize words from the same person in English. This first breakthrough led to Study in 2021signed by a team led by neurosurgeon Edward Chang, from the University of California.
The computer system was initially designed to translate English, but the researchers realized that having a bilingual patient, whose first language was Spanish, gave them the opportunity to better understand how language or languages are stored and transmitted in our brain.
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