AI to the rescue — A voice for the mute
In a world that celebrates technological achievements, the recent breakthrough of allowing a once-silent woman to “speak” through the aid of artificial intelligence raises both wonder and concern.
Ann Johnson, whose voice had been muted by a merciless stroke, now finds herself reanimated, not by divine intervention, but by the calculated calculations of machines.
Imagine the surreal scene:
253 terminals delicately inserted into Johnson’s brain, like modern-day Frankenstein’s experiment. These terminals, like the receivers of the mind, intercept the elusive neural signals that once formed the train of her thoughts. These signals, previously shrouded in the profound silence of her incapacitated state, are now channeled to a network of intelligent computers.
The process, like Prometheus’s gift, gifts Johnson with a digital doppelgänger. This virtual mimic, a brown-haired avatar that she handpicked herself, becomes her newfound voice. It mimics her long-lost voice, the voice in which she confidently raised a toast at her wedding, celebrating love and life.
The avatar’s eyes blink and its expressions shift — a replication of human emotions. It smiles, raises brows, and purses lips, trying to be the best surrogate for a voice that was once organically hers.
Johnson, the narrator, silently and persistently rehearses an array of phrases from a vast 1,024-word lexicon. With each internal repetition, a discourse of neural activity takes shape, each note representing a distinctive sound pattern.
The AI hones its skills to interpret these neural sparks, not in their entirety, but in their elemental form — phonemes, the elemental building blocks of speech. The word “Hello,” for instance, is disassembled into the phonemic quartet of “HH,” “AH,” “L,” and “OW.”
The AI deciphers a collection of 39 phonemes. Hence, it translates Johnson’s cerebral melodies into full-fledged words, achieving a tempo of roughly 80 words per minute. While this may be slow in comparison to the flow of human chatter, it’s a stride towards bridging the mind and the machine.
Dr. Edward Chang, chairman of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, the puppeteer behind this puppet show, speaks of restoring humanity’s essence.
The promise of further refinement brings forth the removal of the wires that bind her to the mechanical instrument, hinting at more freedom of speech.
As Dr. Chang’s team propels forward, they dream that humanity can once again converse not just with our mouths, but with our minds too.
