Machine translates brainwaves into sentences

Scientists have taken a step forward in their ability to decode what a person is saying just by looking at their brainwaves when they speak.

They trained algorithms to transfer the brain patterns into sentences in real-time and with word error rates as low as 3%.

Previously, these so-called "brain-machine interfaces" have had limited success in decoding neural activity, BBC News reports, citing Nature Neuroscience..

The earlier efforts in this area were only able decode fragments of spoken words or a small percentage of the words contained in particular phrases.

Machine learning specialist Dr Joseph Makin from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), US, and colleagues tried to improve the accuracy.

Four volunteers read sentences aloud while electrodes recorded their brain activity.

The brain activity was fed into a computing system, which created a representation of regularly occurring features in that data.