Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South)-Facebook is working on new technology that will allow users to type straight from their minds at 100 words per minute.
According to a PC World report a team of over 60 scientists, engineers and others at the company’s Building 8, a secretive research lab, are working in the area of silent speech communications.
The report says the company aims to develop a system that will let people type straight from the brain about five time faster than they can type on their phone today.
This will eventually be turned into a wearable technology that can be manufactured at scale.
“So what if you could type directly from your brain?’
“It sounds impossible but it is closer than you may realise”
“Over the next 2 years, we will be building systems that demonstrate the capability to type at 100 wpm be decoding neural activity devoted to speech”, Regina Dugan, vice president of engineering at F8 wrote on her Facebook post recently.
According to PC World the concept isn’t exactly new with Stanford University having shown that a brain-to-computer interface can enable people with paralysis to type via direct brain control.
This was through the use of electrode arrays placed in the brain to record signals from the motor cortex that controls muscle movement.
“Facebook’s approach will be focused on developing a non-invasive system that could one day become a speech prosthetic for people with communication disorders or a new means for input to augmented reality”, said Dugan.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously wrote on the same issue.
“Our brains produce enough data to stream 4 HD movies every second. The problem is that the best way we have to get information out into the world-speech- can only transmit about the same amount of data as a 1980s modem”, he wrote on his post.
The human brain streams 1 terabits per second although speech is transmitted at 40-60 bits per second according to Dugan.
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