AI Tools Helped Restore Speech for a Woman With Paralysis: 'She Felt Embodied'

The technology that allows you to transcribe your work meetings might help people with paralysis speak again. Researchers at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco used generative AI to reduce the delay between when a person with severe paralysis attempts to speak and when the computer device plays the sound. Their work helped a woman named Ann, who suffered a brainstem stroke in 2005 at age 30, to communicate in close to real time. Ann spoke with a voice that sounded like her own because the model was trained on recordings of her from before her stroke. The deployment of gen AI in a few different ways allowed researchers to make improvements in neuroprosthesis that might have taken far longer, said Cheol Jun Cho, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in electrical engineering and computer sciences and co-lead author of the study, which appeared in March in Nature Neuroscience. It's one example of how generative AI tools -- using the same underlying technology that powers chatbots like OpenAI's Cha ... Read full article.