From Massive Science:
Translating up to 50 sentences at once, it’s about as accurate as human transcription
You′ve probably been there: wanting to text someone quickly, but your hands are busy, maybe holding the groceries or cooking.....MUCH MORE
Siri, Alexa, and other virtual assistants have provided one new layer of interaction between us and our devices, but what if we could move beyond even that? This is the premise of some brain-machine interfaces (BMIs). We covered these at Massive before, and some of the potentials and limitations surrounding them.
Using BMIs, people are able to move machines, and control virtual avatars without moving a muscle. This is usually done by accessing the region of the brain responsible for a specific movement and then decoding that electrical signal into something a computer can understand. One area that was still hard to decode, however, was speech itself.
But now, scientists from the University of California in San Francisco have now reported a way to translate human brain activity directly into text.
Joseph Makin and their team used recent advances in a type of algorithm that deciphers and translates one computer language into another (one that is the basis for a lot of human language translation software). Based on those improvements in the software, the scientists designed a BMI that is able to translate a full sentence worth of brain activity into an actual written sentence.
Four participants, who already had brain implants for treating seizures, trained this computer algorithm by reading sentences out loud for about 30 minutes while the implants recorded their brain activity. The algorithm is composed of a type of artificial intelligence that looks at information that needs to be in a specific order to make sense (like speech) and make predictions of what comes next....
Why do I keep coming up with blank pages?
And though not really related, spooky in its own right:
Robot Writing Moves from Journalism to Wall Street
From MIT's Technology Review:
Software that turns data into written text could help us make sense of a coming tsunami of data.
Software that was first put to work writing news reports has now found another career option: drafting reports for financial giants and U.S. intelligence agencies.
The writing software, called Quill, was developed by Narrative Science, a Chicago company set up in 2010 to commercialize technology developed at Northwestern University that turns numerical data into a written story. It wasn’t long before Quill was being used to report on baseball games for TV and online sports outlets, and company earnings statements for clients such as Forbes.
Quill’s early career success generated headlines of its own, and the software was seen by some as evidence that intelligent software might displace human workers. Narrative Science CEO Stuart Frankel says that the publicity, even if some of it was negative, was a blessing. “A lot of people felt threatened by what we were doing, and we got a lot of coverage,” he says. “It led to a lot of inquiries from all different industries and to the evolution to a different business.”
Narrative Science is now renting out Quill’s writing skills to financial customers such as T. Rowe Price, Credit Suisse, and USAA to write up more in-depth, lengthy reports on the performance of mutual funds that are then distributed to investors or regulators.
“It goes from the job of a small army of people over weeks to just a few seconds,” says Frankel. “We do 10- to 15-page documents for some financial clients.”
An investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment division, led the company to work from multiple U.S. intelligence agencies. Asked about that work, Frankel says only that “The communication challenges of the U.S. intelligence community are very similar to those of our other customers.” Altogether, Quill now churns out millions of words per day.....
