Brain implants give ALS patients the voice to speak and sing

Brain signals from a 46-year-old man who lost his voice to ALS were decoded by experimental brain implants and translated directly into intelligible speech. A 58-year-old woman, a trained singer, whose voice was gradually silenced by the disease, was able to sing a musical scale.The new advances from researchers at the University of California, Davis, to be presented next week at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington, demonstrate that research into brain-computer interfaces is crossing from proof-of-concept demonstrations into everyday usefulness.