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thinking out loud

Mind-reading headset lets you control your devices with your thoughts

The AlterEgo headset lets you talk to everything from digital assistants to computers with your mind, and could one day let you silently communicate with other people

FORGET voice controls, there's a new gadget in town that lets you command digital devices using just your thoughts.

The headset, which can read the words you're picturing in your mind, sounds like something out of science-fiction but is an actual, real-life gizmo from the boffs at MIT.

 The AlterEgo headset sounds like something out of sci-fi
The AlterEgo headset sounds like something out of sci-fiCredit: MIT

The white device (dubbed AlterEgo) hooks around the ear and sits on the jawline of the face.

It works by reading the signals your brain sends to your face muscles when you think about saying a word, preparing them for the upcoming vocalisation – what's known as sub-vocalisations, or "silent speech".

Electrodes in the headset track these neuromuscular signals in the jaw and face.

They're then broken down by an artificial intelligence – which has been trained to pair certain signals with certain words – and sent to a connected device.

This allows the gizmo to act as thought-conveying microphone for computers and digital assistants, like Siri and Alexa.

Meanwhile the headset's bone conduction headphones allow the wearer to hear audio from a connected device, while still being able to hear the world around them.

In a video, lead developer Arnav Kapur can be seen using AlterEgo to control a streaming service and to calculate the cost of his shopping.

“The motivation for this was to build an IA device — an intelligence-augmentation device,” says Kapur, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab.

“Our idea was: Could we have a computing platform that’s more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways and that feels like an internal extension of our own cognition?”

At present, AlterEgo is still in the prototype stage, and so its understanding is still limited.

But its machine learning system will become more aware the more neuromuscular signals it learns to decipher.

It's already been used by volunteers to carry out simple tasks that require a limited vocabulary, like issuing chess moves using subvocal commands.

The researchers hope that with more training it will be able to fully grasp conversations.

And when that happens the device could probably be used for communication between people using thoughts.

So no one need speak again.

Jokes aside, AlterEgo could prove revolutionary for communication in noisy environments or where silence is required.

It could also break down barriers for those unable to speak for medical reasons.
