Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Brain-Computer Interface Smashes Previous Record for Typing Speed

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 132 posts

Re: Brain-Computer Interface Smashes Previous Record for Typing Speed

#111

Post by userbinator »

formerly_proven wrote: post #29

> A machine learning algorithm then decodes the brain patterns associated with each letter, and a computer displays the letters on a screen. The participant was able to communicate at about 90 characters, or 18 words, per minute. > By comparison, able-bodied people close in age to the study participant can type on a smartphone at about 23 words per minute, the authors say. Adults can type on a full keyboard at an ave…

I suspect much of the population either doesn't type much, or doesn't make much of an effort to type faster. My average is in the 140-160WPM range (to try to type at 40WPM consistently I would have to be deliberately slow, as even one-handed I'll easily go over 60), although I never learned touch-typing formally; I attribute it to spending extensive amounts of time in using IM, which basically forces you to type quickly you want to keep a reasonably natural pace of conversation and not lose your thoughts. Then again, I've interacted with much younger coworkers, many of whom were surprised at the speed at which I could return a reply (in full sentences with punctuation, without abbreviations and such) in a chat, so I'm not sure if the motivation is still there today --- especially with audio/video calls being more common.

Re: Brain-Computer Interface Smashes Previous Record for Typing Speed

#112

Post by [deleted] »

Zancarius wrote: post #64
vmception wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

65 year olds now had the same 30+ years as everyone else to get up to speed on computers but most still lean on the “hey you know I’m X-years old so you know me and computers don’t get along especially with the texting heh heh” As there are also plenty of competent typists and computer users at that age, It’s all about the influences, wonder how I can avoid that and brain plasticity excuses

> It’s all about the influences This is key. Everything else is an excuse. My Mum is in her 70s and until she lost feeling in one of her hands (chemotherapy 23-ish years ago) she was an exceedingly fast touch typist. Even without feeling in her hands, she could still type at ~40 WPM, possibly higher depending on what she was typing. Arthritis means she now mostly uses a tablet. But looking at other people in that age…

[deleted]

Re: Brain-Computer Interface Smashes Previous Record for Typing Speed

#113

Post by herval »

userbinator wrote: post #111
formerly_proven wrote: post #29

> A machine learning algorithm then decodes the brain patterns associated with each letter, and a computer displays the letters on a screen. The participant was able to communicate at about 90 characters, or 18 words, per minute. > By comparison, able-bodied people close in age to the study participant can type on a smartphone at about 23 words per minute, the authors say. Adults can type on a full keyboard at an ave…

I suspect much of the population either doesn't type much, or doesn't make much of an effort to type faster. My average is in the 140-160WPM range (to try to type at 40WPM consistently I would have to be deliberately slow, as even one-handed I'll easily go over 60), although I never learned touch-typing formally; I attribute it to spending extensive amounts of time in using IM, which basically forces you to type quic…

How do you manage to sustain 140-160 WPM? I consider myself a very fast typist, and I don’t think I ever broke 100 WPM (it’s the maximum I ever got in one of those typing tests)

Re: Brain-Computer Interface Smashes Previous Record for Typing Speed

#115

Post by sellyme »

j7ake wrote: post #83
gxs wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My average typing speed is 80-110, but I can max out at 121. This is for standard english words, not the crazy blocks of letters and special characters used for competition, which IMO isn't practical for the average user. I actually spend a few minutes every few weeks taking typing tests etc, as it's a valuable skill to me. I figure if the average typing speed is somewhere between 50-80 WPM, if I can type 50% faster,…

Are tasks like responding to emails and adding comments limited by typing speed ? I would have guessed most typing tasks aside from copying text are limited by knowing what to type.

Pretty much all of the time I'm typing natural language (chat apps, emails, writing this comment here) I'm going to be limited more by my typing speed (~120WPM) than by the speed at which I can think of the words I want to type.

A pretty trivial demonstration of this is that I can talk much faster than I can type, and I would expect that you can too.

Re: Brain-Computer Interface Smashes Previous Record for Typing Speed

#116

Post by sellyme »

goodpoint wrote: post #76
SamBam wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's silly that it's hidden, because 18 WPM for a quadriplegic still seems extremely impressive to me, given that it's just working from brain electrodes and not some muscle the person can control. Yes, the headline is silly, because by hiding it it ended up causing the snark about 18 WPM being slow. I'm surprised, though, that the most efficient way to do this is still to have the person imagine physically drawing t…

> 18 WPM for a quadriplegic still seems extremely impressive to me Honest question: how so? We should expect a direct neural interface to far exceed the speed of any manual input device, especially after 40-50 years of research.

> We should expect a direct neural interface to far exceed the speed of any manual input device

Counterpoint: If this were the case I would have already heard about techies getting brain implants to optimise their communication.

Since that hasn't happened, the only logical assumption is that available neural interfaces are slower than existing manual input methods.

Re: Brain-Computer Interface Smashes Previous Record for Typing Speed

#117

Post by sellyme »

meowface wrote: post #15
lunixbochs wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The participant was able to communicate at about 90 characters, or 18 words, per minute. > By comparison, able-bodied people close in age to the study participant can type on a smartphone at about 23 words per minute, the authors say. Adults can type on a full keyboard at an average of about 40 words per minute.

I used to type "semi-competitively" (aka just spending a lot of time on typeracer.com) and could get around 170 WPM if I put enough effort into it. (At least when I was younger. Probably slower now.) 18 WPM would make me feel like a snail. However, I feel fairly confident that within 1 - 3 decades some kind of BCI will let any user surpass the equivalent of 200 - 300 WPM after a bit of training. And hopefully even wi…

> 18 WPM would make me feel like a snail.

On the other hand, this interface is for people who have a current typing speed of approximately 0 WPM (or ~8 WPM if they were lucky enough to have the previous leading BCI technology available to them). So it's all about perspective.

Re: Brain-Computer Interface Smashes Previous Record for Typing Speed

#119

Post by ramshanker »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #107
ramshanker wrote: post #61

Once this read the mind thing matures, so much of the software will have to be rewritten. Even now sometimes I have to joke around in office "PC is slower than me" because I gave certain commands in sequence and it is still performing them one by one while I wait for computer to catch up. Now imaging this, command directly from brain to the machine. In engineering world, It would increase the productivity by at et le…

If you're already able to do input faster than the computer can process your commands, how would a faster input method increase productivity?

Well, there are many variety of commands/actions. For the compute intensive ones, brain-computer-interface wouldn't have any implication. However there are many-many mundane commands too, with near instantaneous processing, those are bottlenecked by Human's mechanical limitations. These are the ones which would improve tremendously.

Re: Brain-Computer Interface Smashes Previous Record for Typing Speed

#120

Post by meowface »

toomanyducks wrote: post #31
meowface wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to type "semi-competitively" (aka just spending a lot of time on typeracer.com) and could get around 170 WPM if I put enough effort into it. (At least when I was younger. Probably slower now.) 18 WPM would make me feel like a snail. However, I feel fairly confident that within 1 - 3 decades some kind of BCI will let any user surpass the equivalent of 200 - 300 WPM after a bit of training. And hopefully even wi…

Where do you get that confidence? Reading the article, I'm mostly seeing somewhat deliberately hyped-up claims and hand-wavey references to AI, neither of which give me much confidence in this tech taking a tremendous leap anytime soon. Still very impressive, but as someone who knows nothing about the tech, I'm not sure why I should expect it to improve so quickly?

Well, I did say 1 - 3 decades, which isn't "anytime soon" I think. I just think the potential has been demonstrated, and to me it seems fairly feasible that if you hypothetically had a device that could transmit thoughts at near the speed of thought, you could get around 200 - 300 WPM. If it could somehow interpret more abstract things like images, then the information density could be higher, too.

I could be wrong, though. Maybe people's thinking rates wildly vary. And maybe my 170 WPM was pretty close to my actual speed of thought. It also may depend a lot on if it's something you're thinking about on the fly vs. regurgitating existing thoughts.

Post reply on HN