Headline, August 31 2024/ ''' SCIENCE A.I. SCULPTS '''

''' SCIENCE A.I.

 SCULPTS '''

AN INSIDIOUS DISEASE STOLE HIS VOICE. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE got it back. Implants in the patient's brain recognize words, then help convert them to sound.

Four years ago, Casey Harrell sang his last bedtime nursery rhyme to his daughter. By then A.L.S. had begun laying waste to Mr. Harrell's muscles, stealing from him one ritual after another : going on walks with his wife, holding his daughter, turning the pages of a book. '' Like a night burglar, '' his wife, Levana Saxon, wrote of the disease in a poem.

But no theft was as devastating to Mr, Harrell, 46, as the fading of his speech. He had sung his last Whitney Houston song at karaoke. A climate activist, he had delivered his last unassisted Zoom presentation to fellow organizers.

Last July, doctors at the University of California, Davis, surgically implanted electrodes in Mr. Harrell's brain to try to discern what he was trying to say. That made him the latest test subject in a daunting scientific quest, one that has attracted deep-pocketed firms like Elon Musk's company Neuralink :

Connecting people's brains to computers, potentially restoring their lost faculties. Doctors told him that he would be advancing the cause of science, but that he was not likely to reverse his fortunes.

YET the results surpassed expectations, the researchers reported last Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, setting a new bar for implanted speech disorders and disorders and illustrating the potential power of such devices for people with speech impairments.

'' It's very exciting,'' said Dr. Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in Mr.Harrell's case but has developed different speech implants. A device that just years ago '' seemed like science fiction,'' he said, is now ''improving, getting optimized. so quickly.''

Mr. Harrell's team sank into his brain's outer layer four electrode arrays A.L.S, that looked like tiny beds of nails. That was double the number that had recently been implanted in the speech areas of someone with A.L.S. or amyotrophic internal sclerosis, in a separate study.

Each array's 64 spikes picked up electric impulses from neurons that fired when Mr. Harrell tried to move his mouth, lips, jaw and tongue to speak.

Three weeks after surgery, scientists gathered in Mr. Harrell's living room in Oakland, Calif, to. ''plug him in,'' connecting the implant to a bank of computers with cables attached to two metal posts protruding from Mr.Harrell's skull.

After only briefly training the computers to recognize Mr. Harrell's speech, the implants began recording what he intended to say from a 50-word vocabulary with 99.6 percent accuracy.

The device worked so well, so soon, that the scientists had to cut an initial session from their analysis : Halfway through trying to speak his first prompt aloud - '' What good is that?'' a shaking, smiling Mr. Harrell crumpled into tears.

To the average listener, '' what '' and ''good'' had come out of Mr. Harrell's mouth muddled and indecipherable. But to the electrodes tuned to individual neurons in Mr. Harrell's brain, the words were perfectly clear. A screen in front of him displayed exactly what he had been trying to say.

The device had, in effect, made an end run around Mr. Harrell's disease, relying not on his weakened facial muscles but rather on the parts of his motor cortex where he was first laying down the instructions for what to say.

'' The key innovation was putting more arrays, with very precise targeting, into the speechiest parts of the brain we can find,'' said Sergey Stavisky, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, who helped lead the study.

By the second day, the machine was ranging across an available vocabulary of 125,000 words with 90 percent accuracy and, for the first time, producing sentences of Mr. Harrell's own making.

The device spoke them in a voice remarkably like his own, too. Using podcast interviews and other old recordings, the researchers had created a deep fake of Mr. Harrell's pre A.L.S. voice.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on A.I. and Cures and Solutions continues. The World Students Society thanks Banjamin Mueller.

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