Problem: ‘Email will be 10x less laborious once I can respond with my mind. Fingers and voice are slow.’ Ryan Hoover sums up the thoughts of many with his tweet.
Those early morning runs through your email, where you’re still shaking out the cobwebs and trying to think of a good response, need to be made easier. Trying to work your thoughts into the right words takes a long time-and it’s an annoying process. If there was a way to make everything run from the mind to the computer with no need to type it out, email and writing in general would be much easier.
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Solution: This would be a program that connects your brain to an AI, which would interpret your thoughts into words. It would be able to write emails, essays, or whatever you need that you don’t want to type out. Elon Musk’s Neuralink has shown some ways that connecting your brain to an AI could be possible, but they have been focusing on the technology side of the equation and have not put it into real use with an implant yet.
Academics have been testing something similar to this idea, but with only one test subject and a limited number of tests, it is not near being completed. This research team followed these steps during their test:
They put implants in the premotor cortex of a paralyzed person’s brain, where intentions are formed to perform movements
The person was asked to imagine writing letters down, and the researchers tracked the neural movement.
They discovered how certain movements are clustered around a single letter, which helped them decide on what the character was when certain movements were going on.
The error rate was very low at only 5%, but there was a small sample of about 240 sentences.
These tests used preformed sentences, and when the subject was asked to make their own sentences, the speed dropped to 75 characters a minute from 90, and the error rate went up to 2% with autocorrection from less than 1%.
Though this idea is far from the stages of publication, it has so much potential. AI is just getting more powerful, and by figuring out a way to link a human’s brain to AI, we can fully utilize the power of AI combined with the power of the human mind.
This idea is mainly helpful for people who are unable to type or write, but still have brain function where they make thoughts and want to put these thoughts on paper. It would give them a way to make their wishes possible, and hopefully use a streamlined, easy method with a one time implant. It would also benefit the regular person who wants to get emails or other papers done at a more effective pace. Businesses could be interested as it could help make writing more efficient.
Monetization: One-time fee to implement this system in a person, and possibly add-ons that could be on a monthly billing basis.
Market Size: Potentially global, as the whole world could benefit from this idea, and it would be useful to everyone, from disabled people to major businesses.