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Brain-Computer Interface Smashes Previous Record for Typing Speed

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

#71

Post by computerlab »

carapace wrote: post #58
fnord77 wrote: post #44

will such an interface ever be possible without invasive implants in your brain?

Yes. The "secret" is to use hypnosis to "program" your unconscious mind to emit signals corresponding to your conscious "stream of thought". The result is a subjective experience of thinking words and they appear on the screen. Someone else in this thread speculated about e.g. controlling an extra pair of (artificial) arms to play the piano with four hands. That sort of thing should be straightforward too. In re: the…

I’m interested in hearing more about this approach, are there any papers on it? I see two different ideas here: the use of hypnosis to create unconscious “hooks” into conscious thought. This could be useful if for whatever reason certain features of conscious are not easy to detect (another comment mentioned that it’s harder to get clear signals from the frontal cortex). Then there is the idea of using muscle twitched / GVS as an information channel. It seems hard to get a high bandwidth from this (compared to invasive or EEG-like approaches).

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

#72

Post by ckemere »

Lots of discussion of WPM speed. Prof. Shenoy presented at our weekly seminar (shameless plug - https://twitter.com/RiceNeuro) a couple of weeks ago. I think he considers the goal to be reaching the rate of speech, which is about 150 WPM. Beyond that, I think that there's a strong argument that our brain is not completely generating/processing thought fast enough to substantially increase output rate.

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

#74

Post by twotwotwo »

A neat thing is this uses a language model reduce the error rate a lot. Autocorrect, conceptually, though theirs is offline rather than as-you-input. In a way the clever software involved is maybe the thing that most makes it relevant to this site.

Other tricks we use for noisy touchscreen input could apply here too. For one thing, we've got different models for to collect input. You could try offering autocompletions/predictions to make typing long words faster (long a thing in e.g. single-switch input tools), if watching a screen doesn't slow the person down much. You could try a swipe-like flow where you collect a chunk of data imprecisely but fast (mentally type or scribble a whole word, say), then offer choices.

(Thinking about other extremes, I wonder if there's a way at faster input using a T9-like reduced alphabet (3x3 grid, pick row and column?) or something like that. Or if it could someday work to for people to try to speak or visualize words instead of handwrite.)

You might be able to glue the letter decoding and language model together more closely--feed the letter-decoding NN's uncertainty and less-probable guesses (25% chance this 'e' was really an 'l') to the lang model.

You could learn a person-specific language model, seeding it with a person's writings/speech before the injury or disease (if available), whatever else you think they might need (family/friend names, care requests, etc.), and training the language model as they use the interface (paper already does that with the character-recognizing model).

You could do explicit "mutual training"--while the machine samples how you write letters, it can show you its certainty scores (based on the model it has so far) or maybe something graphical to help you write the letters how it expects (exaggerate certain differences etc.). They already have an "optimized alphabet" that maximizes the machine-visible differences between letters.

From their paper, the existing language model already did very well at producing clean results in this test, but the more you can refine the cleanup, the more you can potentially sacrifice cleanliness of input for greater speed, and maybe get closer to speaking rate.

FWIW some Googling found http://web.stanford.edu/~shenoy/GroupPublications/WillettEtA...

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

#75

Post by throwawayboise »

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…

As someone who is older, I'd phrase it slightly differently. "I'm old, my time on earth will be gone in less time than you've been alive, this thing you're all excited about seems silly and pointless and doesn't solve any problem I have, so I won't waste any of my precious time on it."

This is part of why I've never used Facebook, Twitter, or any of the rest of it.

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

#76

Post by goodpoint »

SamBam wrote: post #19
lhousa wrote: post #5

Shiny title with the actual typing speed so well hidden.

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.

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

#77

Post by Izkata »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #45
martin_a wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the better measure of typing speed Full words correct with no typos. If you want to measure this, you're interested in the combination of reading speed and muscle memory while typing. If you're making typos, your muscle memory is not good. Using a spell checker to automatically fix those words... Well, the number is not comparable, then.

That feels pedantic to me. A more important, but also more difficult, measure would be of information conveyed, regardless of how it's accomplished. A very effective friend of mine once said if your messages are perfect you're spending the oo much time on them.

> the oo much time

Was that intentional? Looks like the other two replies may have read right past that without noticing it...

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

#78

Post by anandoza »

fouric wrote: post #40

> The fastest of these previous typing-by-brain experiments allowed people to type about 40 characters, or 8 words, per minute. Ah, so it's previous record for BCI typing speed , not "typing speed" in general. Original headline (on IEEE side) is misleading.

Yes, I thought the exact same as you -- that the headline meant a BCI achieved like 400 wpm or something.

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

#79

Post by math-dev »

airstrike wrote: post #60
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…

Touchscreen typing on native keyboards always feels slow to me, but with apps like SwiftKey which remap the boundaries of the virtual keyboard to better match your intended keystrokes I can type significantly faster. Add swiping and completion to that and I'm pretty confident one can easily beat that 23wpm mark

I thought Apple had a patent on this technology, interesting to see others do it

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

#80

Post by elmomle »

throwawayboise wrote: post #75
Zancarius wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

As someone who is older, I'd phrase it slightly differently. "I'm old, my time on earth will be gone in less time than you've been alive, this thing you're all excited about seems silly and pointless and doesn't solve any problem I have, so I won't waste any of my precious time on it." This is part of why I've never used Facebook, Twitter, or any of the rest of it.

Makes sense, though I think the same reasoning is often used to excuse obviously inefficient habits. Spending a week to learn to competently use a computer would likely save most people much more than a week over the following ten or even five years.
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