Brain implants give ALS patients the voice to speak and sing

• Brain implants and AI helped a 46-year-old man with ALS speak again, and a 58-year-old former singer sing a scale. The work will be shown at the Society for Neuroscience conference.
• UC Davis researchers said the system now gives “real communication” with a 10-millisecond delay, and reanalysis raised word intelligibility to 94%.
• The team also restored tone and pitch for a woman known as T21, who cried tears of joy. Experts said real-time tests and fully implantable systems are still needed.

Brain signals from a 46-year-old man who lost his voice to ALS were decoded by experimental brain implants and translated directly into intelligible speech. A 58-year-old woman, a trained singer, whose voice was gradually silenced by the disease, was able to sing a musical scale.

The new advances from researchers at the University of California, Davis, to be presented next week at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington, demonstrate that research into brain-computer interfaces is crossing from proof-of-concept demonstrations into everyday usefulness.