This mind-reading beanie could make keyboards obsolete

Dictation tech for typing on your computer and mobile devices has gotten way better and more accessible over the last few years, thanks to sophisticated AI models. But an upcoming device can remove even more friction from the process of getting words onto your screen, by simply reading your thoughts.

Palo Alto, California-based startup Sabi is developing what its CEO calls the most wearable brain-computer interface (BCI) on the planet. It's a beanie that you can simply slip on and think about what you want to type, and it'll appear on a connected device at about 30 words per minute.

The venture capital-backed company, which came out of stealth earlier this month, lines these beanies with up to 100,000 tiny sensors, each smaller than a lentil. These are electroencephalography (EEG) sensors designed to record electrical activity from the brain, and they can capture enough to translate your thoughts into text without you uttering a single word out loud.

The big draw here is that, unlike other BCI's like Elon Musk's Neuralink, you don't need to first have your skull drilled into, and wear an implant on your brain where strong signals can be picked up easily. Instead, you can just don a hat and you're good to go.

In addition, Sabi's tech is said to be able to pick up continuous speech as opposed to finite sets of commands like conventional EEG-based devices. The stack includes the aforementioned miniscule biosensors that are powered by chips designed in-house, as well as the company's Brain Foundation Model, which it describes as being trained on the world's largest neural decoding dataset.

Wired notes this amounts to some 100,000 hours of data from 100 volunteers to learn what brain signals are supposed to universally correspond to specific activities. That should help ensure that when two Sabi users think of typing out a particular word, the exact same word appears on screen – despite the signals from their brains potentially differing somewhat.

As someone who records a ton of voice memos and has dabbled in using dictation apps to type, I'd be up to try it. The challenge with those options, even with all the powerful transcription and summarization tools available, is that you've got to speak out loud, and that's not discreet enough for a shared workplace. As for privacy, Sabi says your data is encrypted before it's sent to the cloud, and as such, its model has been trained on encrypted signals rather than unprotected raw data.

And as with other BCIs, this could make computing and communication significantly more accessible to people with impaired motor functions, whether from disabilities or injuries. Since it doesn't require surgical implants, people could try it before committing to the solution with a lot less hassle.

Sabi's beanie is slated to arrive by the end of 2026; a baseball cap version will follow. We don't yet know what these will cost, and whether they'll be able to do more than type. But I sure am excited about the idea of putting a new type of thinking cap on.

Source: Sabi via Wired