A startup called UnBabel has showcased a revolutionary headset that foreshadows the AI-powered interfaces of the future. It will truly allow you to communicate through thought.
Vasco Pedro, CEO of UnBabel, a company specializing in translation that is increasingly using artificial intelligence, believes that “we are witnessing the creation of a “uber cortex”, which will be powered by artificial intelligence and that will exist outside of your biological brain.” So they began to “study brain-communication interfaces”, which led them to a invention called Halo.
A person wearing a physical interface in e-Skin which measures the electrical responses of its muscular and nervous system, uses a mobile application connected to a hub that directs communications between an AI such as ChatGPT-4 and the user. The idea is to create a large, tailor-made language model capable of correlating a set of electrical signals with the words the wearer of the device thinks of.
This AI-powered mobile application will allow people to communicate through thought
Such an invention would of course be useful for people with language impairments or who cannot type on a keyboard. The tools currently available to these users are mostly cumbersome, so applications for a smaller, non-invasive interface, unlike the Neuralink chip that Elon Musk wants to implant in the human brain, would be much more many.
Halo vocalizes the messages received through earpieces, AirPods Pro 2, for example, then interprets the thoughts of the wearer, by “matching their physical response to a word, by having it validated, always via a voice in the earphones, to then send the answer by text”. Despite the dazzling progress made by AI, Halo’s word detection is still too slow to be usable by the general public. According to Mr. Pedro, “when Stephen Hawking’s device allowed him to vocalize two words per minute, Halo already produced 20”. The objective to be marketable is fixed at 80. But according to the inventors, to arrive at a speed of 150 words per minute would unlock “superhuman” abilities.