‘Subvocal speech’ computerized
p2pnet.net News:- If you’re mumbling to yourself while you’re online, it may not be an indication that you’re losing control.
You might, in fact, be surfing.
When someone thinks of phrases and talks so quietly he or she can’t be heard, “the tongue and vocal chords do receive speech signals from the brain,” says NASA scientist Chuck Jorgensen.
Now NASA scientists have begun to computerise silent human speech and silent reading using nerve signals in the throat that control speech, says a Gizmo.com.au story here, going on:
“NASA scientists have found that small, button-sized sensors, stuck under the chin and on either side of the ‘Adam’s apple,’ could gather nerve signals, and send them to a processor and then to a computer program that translates them into words. Eventually, such ’subvocal speech’ systems could be used in spacesuits, in noisy places like airport towers to capture air-traffic controller commands, or even in traditional voice-recognition programs to increase accuracy.”
The first sub-vocal words the system ‘learned’ were stop, go, left, right, alpha and omega and the digits zero through nine, says the story
“Silently speaking these words, scientists conducted simple searches on the Internet by using a number chart representing the alphabet to control a Web browser program. ‘We took the alphabet and put it into a matrix – like a calendar. We numbered the columns and rows, and we could identify each letter with a pair of single-digit numbers,’ Jorgensen said. ‘So we silently spelled out *NASA* and then submitted it to a well-known Web search engine. We electronically numbered the Web pages that came up as search results. We used the numbers again to choose Web pages to examine. This proved we could browse the Web without touching a keyboard,’ Jorgensen explained.”
Scientists are testing new, “noncontact” sensors that can read muscle signals even through a layer of clothing and a second demonstration will be to control a mechanical device using a simple set of commands, Gizmo.com.au quotes Jorgensen as saying. It adds that the Computing, Information and Communications Technology Program, part of NASA’s Office of Exploration Systems, funds the subvocal word-recognition research and that there’s a patent pending for the new technology.
