This hat is designed to read your thoughts

The ability to convert speech to text is Now bake everything Modern computers. But what if you don’t have to filling to your computer? What if you could write by just thinking?

Silicon Valley startup Sabi is emerging from stealth to achieve this goal. The company is developing a Brain wearable It decodes a person’s inner speech into words on a computer screen. CEO Rahul Chhabra says his first product, a brain-reading beanie, will be available by the end of the year. The company is also designing a version of the baseball cap.

This technique is known as A Brain-computer interfaceor BCI, is a device that provides a direct communication path between the brain and an external device. While many companies like Elon Musk’s company Neuralink Sabi develops surgically implanted brain-computer interfaces for people with severe motor disabilities, and the Sabi device could allow anyone to become a robot.

It’s not exactly Musk’s vision of the future, which includes implanted brain chips to allow humans to integrate with artificial intelligence. But venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who was an early investor in OpenAI, says a non-invasive wearable device is the only way to get more people using BCI technology.

“The biggest and worst application of BCI is that you can talk to your computer by thinking about it,” says Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, one of SABI’s investors. “If you have a billion people using BCI to access their computers every day, it can’t be intrusive.”

The Sabi Brain Reading Cap relies on electroencephalography (EEG), or electroencephalography, which uses metal discs placed on the scalp to record the brain’s electrical activity. It is indeed possible to decode imagined speech from an electroencephalogram (EEG), but it is currently limited to small groups of words or commands rather than continuous natural speech.

Photo: Courtesy of SABI

The drawback of the wearable system is that the sensors must listen to the brain through a layer of skin and bone, suppressing nerve signals. Surgically implanted devices pick up much stronger signals because they are located closer to nerve cells. Sabey believes the way to boost accuracy with a wearable device is to dramatically increase the number of sensors in his devices. Most EEG devices contain tens to a few hundred sensors. The Sabi hat will contain between 70,000 and 100,000 miniature sensors.

“Given this high-density sensing, it identifies exactly what and where neural activity is occurring,” Chhabra says. “We use this information to get more reliable data to decode what a person is thinking.”

The company aims for an initial typing speed of 30 or so words per minute. That’s slower than most people type, but he says speed will improve as users spend more time using the max.