Facebook develops devices that turn thoughts into text, words

In Facebook's vision, in the near future people will be able to type and send messages to each other just by thinking in their brains just like in sci-fi movies.

To do this, Facebook has developed a project called Moonshot to create wearable devices such as enhanced virtual reality glasses and the ability to let people interact with each other in real life without having to touch the phone.

Facebook develops devices that turn thoughts into text, words Picture 1 — Facebook has the ambition to develop glasses that allow users to text each other using brainwaves.

In a blog post, Facebook representatives shared that with this product people can send a message while still communicating with the world around without having to plug in the phone.

At the F8 developer conference in 2017, Facebook announced for the first time that it is developing a computer brain interface. Here, Regina Dugan, the head of the department at the time, said Facebook wanted to create a system that could record people's thoughts into text at 100 words per minute, about five times faster. times compared to the speed of typing on a normal person's phone.

Before Facebook, researchers at Stanford found ways to do the same thing to help paralyzed patients communicate. However, their method requires implanting electrodes into the brain. This means complicated surgeries.

But with Facebook, they want to create a wearable device that can simplify things.

Facebook develops devices that turn thoughts into text, words Picture 2 — The device turns thought into text, speech will be useful for those who lose mobility. The most vivid example of the benefits of this technology is theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.

Facebook has partnered with researchers at the University of California (San Francisco - USA) in the hope of being able to decipher words from brainwave signals on a computer screen. Three people with epilepsy agreed to participate in the researchers' experiments and allowed them to temporarily attach electrodes to their brains. After that, the test participants answered 9 simple questions like 'When do you want me to check you out?', 'What is your room like?' . Then, based on the activity of brain waves In real time, Facebook's machine learning algorithms decode a set of spoken words and phrases.

Although new technology has made great progress, Facebook still has to admit that in order to be able to build an enhanced virtual reality glasses with the ability to turn thoughts into text or words in the future they will have to try harder.