14 ms·
Brain-Computer Interface Smashes Previous Record for Typing Speed
- newsbinator 5y ago> “It’s at least half way to able-bodied typing speed, and that’s why this paper is in Nature.”
- lunixbochs 5y ago> 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.
- opan 5y agoThanks, I thought from the headline this was enabling over 200wpm maybe.
- zyemuzu 5y agoSame. One of the reasons I hate using my phone to type is how slow I am compared to using a full keyboard. This would be hell for me.
- goldenkey 5y agoThe current generation is a bunch of thumb typers. Ye abandon all hope..
- codefined 5y agoI don't know if it's cultural, but as someone of the 'current generation' (Gen Z), I feel that the opposite is true and typing speeds increase as you get younger (to some limit). I've tried to back this up and only found a single, questionable, data source[0] on the topic but I do attend several typing competitions and some of the young ages are phenomenal. I was beaten a few months ago by a 15 year old who was typing >220wpm+ for 5 minutes. [0] http://drwes.blogspot.com/2011/01/results-are-in-age-vs-typing-speed-in.html http://drwes.blogspot.com/2011/01/results-are-in-age-vs-typi...
- toomanyducks 5y agoI'll second the other Gen z person in the replies and say that lots of us hate thumb typing and if we're going to generalize across every single living person by one factor, my experience is that typing speed goes down with age.
- InvaderFizz 5y agoThe original iPhone is the perfect size for my hands and thumb typing. I was quite fast in landscape due to the placement of everything and my ability to also rock the phone while I typed. This increased my speed dramatically. Sadly, that is not really an option anymore as I gladly give it up for the larger real estate of the 6" models. If I have something long to say and I'm not too concerned about accuracy, I just use text to speech.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoThat makes me wonder whether cell phones should let you customize the keyboard, esp. the size of it.
- meowface 5y agoI 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 with a device that sits on your head rather than in your brain. So I'm just kind of looking at this like ML research circa 1990. We're hardly even in the infancy stage yet.
- toomanyducks 5y agoWhere 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?
- faichai 5y agoThe fact that we can apparently detect repeatable patterns of brain activity, and do it across a few modalities (handwriting, cursor movements) shows that a lot of the core problems are solved. We’ve achieved Proof of Concept. With greater sensor fidelity, greater quantity of data, improved ML approaches combined with alternate detection targets (particularly subvocalisation) means that getting to faster than parity WPM seems like a realistic result. Incremental improvements to tech is something we humans are quite good at.
- meowface 5y agoWell, 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.
- lhousa 5y agoShiny title with the actual typing speed so well hidden.
- slver 5y ago18 words/min
- SamBam 5y agoIt'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 the letters by hand. I know motor neurons are probably our most reliable output, but I would still think that, with all the advances in training from noisy data in the past decade, that training what the thought of "A", "B" etc look like in the head would be doable. Or even what the thought of hearing or saying "A", "B" etc looks like. The auditory cortex is activated when we imagine sounds. Or, if they wanted to stick to motor neurons, could they have the person imagine saying the letters with their mouth? I'm sure they've thought about this stuff and it's harder than it seems, of course. But I would just predict that brain-computer interfaces 20 years from now won't involve imagining using your hand to write letters.
- etrautmann 5y agoGreat point! The electrode arrays used in these studies are implanted in the participants' motor cortex in an area called the "hand knob". Neurons here are highly modulated during motor output, not only for the hand, but also for the rest of the body. This area is close to the output though, and abstract higher-level features like the "idea of an A" isn't likely to be decodable from neurons there. Future research is looking at exactly this, but will likely require recording in a different area. For context, I did my PhD in the lab that did the work in this article.
- grogenaut 5y agoWhen typing in passwords on a phone I have to visualize the keystrokes by thinking about the finger movements and concentrating on my forearms without really moving my fingers. Generally once fast and once slow to think about the actual activations.
- goldenkey 5y agoKnowing that the average typing speed of adult humans is a measly 40 wpm gives me more faith in the failure of our species. Sir Francis Galton pioneered the study of psychometrics which showed that intelligence is positively correlated with reaction speed. So it's not surprising that the average person is slow at a cognitive task like typing.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen_box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen_box
- haskellandchill 5y ago> Knowing that the average typing speed of adult humans is a measly 40 wpm gives me more faith in the failure of our species. Uh, that we can even type is in and of itself a wondrous thing. Enjoy your miasma.
- goldenkey 5y agoBiology is just carbon based circuitry based on digital base 4 (DNA.) Electronics are just as messy with tin whiskers, fried resistors, capacitors, memory errors, clock mistimings, etc.. Energy itself is miasma. But okay, I'll enjoy my privileged "human" miasma ;-)
- pythonlion 5y agoHumans typing slow, the end is near! It doesn't matter how fast you type what matter is you don't always type stuff like this
- lallysingh 5y ago.. even worse is how slowly we think!!
- The_rationalist 5y agoAre there any study precisely correlating IQ with writing speed?
- doggodaddo78 5y agoSpeaking of BCI, there are startups intent on implanting thousands of nanoscale sensors directly in the brain to gather copious amounts of data directly.
- slver 5y agoI wouldn't call it "copious amounts of data directly" you still gotta train yourself to use it, and the interface itself should train itself to recognize it. It might be enough to make people walk again though.
- doggodaddo78 5y agoPartially correct, except the vast numbers of sensors have additional multiple uses including detailed monitoring, biofeedback, and actual input.
- onion2k 5y ago"You are seeing this advert because we detected that you thought about the Budwesier 'Wassup!' advert that aired 22 years ago and it increased dopamine uptake by 3.7%"
- user3939382 5y agoIt’s been clear to me for several years that the future of computing is BCI coupled with augmented reality. However, considering how much the now-normalized ill effects of the digital privacy dystopia we’re already living in would be multiplied by that development, I really fear for the future.
- mxmilkiib 5y agoHow long until an inner monologue cannot hide from the "authorities"? Also, Macross Plus, spoiler, for the subconscious throwing up images in a high stress environment; https://youtube.com/watch?t=2077&v=Fgg6p9gSeR0 https://youtube.com/watch?t=2077&v=Fgg6p9gSeR0
- superkuh 5y agoIt's too bad the ieee.org site itself no longer has words on it. It's just a javascript application spinner gif.
- rareform 5y agoworks for me, it auto-reloads the page for some reason tho
- lmilcin 5y agoOkay, first of all, this is great achievement. But comparing speeds isn't really necessary or even relevant. For a person that literally has no other way to communicate nobody will be complaining the can type 20% slower than a person with a smartphone. The fact they can type at all is important. Now, for the speeds, I type 80wpm/400cpm but what is more important I can also freely think while I do so. I don't even know consciously where the keys are on the keyboard, I need to focus on a character and then see where the finger goes as if I was bystander, a passenger of a mech body that observes it do something. I can only assume that writing with brain-computer interface requires incredible focus and most likely engagement of visual cortex which would preclude from using it for anything else (so no ability to imagine any imagery while typing).
- aaron-santos 5y agoWhy make a cynical assumption at all? Francis R. Willett, Donald T. Avansino, Leigh R. Hochberg, Jaimie M. Henderson, and Krishna V. Shenoy are real people. You could, you know, just ask them.
- lmilcin 5y agoWhat cynical assumption? It is well known visual cortex can't do too many things at the same time. The famous gorilla experiment shows this. And if you need to imagine anything graphical it most likely involves visual cortex.
- EMM_386 5y ago> But comparing speeds isn't really necessary or even relevant. This isn't a comparison between this and typing on a keyboard. It's a comparison to the prior state of the art in this technology.
- amelius 5y agoMost people use their visual cortex to see what they are typing, though. EDIT: I mean, on the screen (and perhaps some on their keyboards).
- Dumblydorr 5y agoWhat's the better measure of typing speed: full words correct with no typos, or full words typos included? A buddy of mine used some timing app for our typing speeds, you had to backspace repeatedly to retype a word if you misspelled it. I argued that is unrealistic, you can just use spell check or just catch the typos during your editing read through.
- martin_a 5y ago> 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.
- jameshart 5y agoHow does ‘muscle memory’ apply to a brain computer interface?
- martin_a 5y agoOP was talking about comparing typing speeds with his buddy, not the neural interface.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoThat 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.
- martin_a 5y ago"Measuring typing speed" is just silly, if you ask me. For the reasons you already pointed out. Typing speed is not about understanding information to its fullest, it's just a somewhat quirky metric for the speed of replication of words.
- formerly_proven 5y ago> 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 average of about 40 words per minute. I had no idea average typing speed is this slow, though the extreme slowness of touchscreen typing is no surprise.
- bigdubs 5y agoKeyboard wpm is about double; ~37-44wpm is P50. Still not super fast though.
- vmception 5y ago65 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
- Zancarius 5y ago> 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 range, I can think of literally zero from church who even know how to touch type. It's probably the difference between someone who had to do secretarial work and someone who did not. I do think your first statement is absolutely on the mark. e.g., "I'm old, and I don't understand it, so I won't try." The old adage is still true: Whether you think you can or you can't you're probably right.
- fouric 5y ago> 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.
- kibwen 5y agoFor the record, it looks like the record for typing on standard keyboards is 212 WPM (on both QWERTY and DVORAK, amusingly), while the record on a stenography keyboard is 375 WPM.
- SomewhatLikely 5y agoAny idea on the speed of dictation? Edit: Found a reference that average dictation speed is around 150wpm, but also mentions some tests going up to almost 300. So it would seem the average person could be almost 4 times faster speaking rather than typing. https://www.reference.com/business-finance/average-dictation-speed-c4496ed481457f6c https://www.reference.com/business-finance/average-dictation...
- anandoza 5y agoYes, I thought the exact same as you -- that the headline meant a BCI achieved like 400 wpm or something.
- castis 5y agoThis is the "next" technology I'm excited about. A cap/something that lets me provide another input device to my machine where I can treat it like a keyboard. Imagine being able to think about a chord and have that input sent to stdin. What could be extra cool is just imagining a loop construct in your head and it just appears in your text editor. Is there already a scene for this? Sign me up.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoI'll be excited when it lets me do things I can't yet, like control a second pair of arms. Every piano player's dream.
- twobitshifter 5y agoRobotic extra thumb: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2277955-this-robotic-extra-thumb-can-be-controlled-by-moving-your-toes/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2277955-this-robotic-ex... But they use toes to control the thumb instead of BMI.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoI write at 50 wpm, type at 100, and speak at 150, a brain interface would have to be 300 or more to make it worth wearing another wearable.
- D13Fd 5y agoThat's surprising to me. I mean, if I could put on a headband or hat and "type," hands free and wirelessly, on any connected Bluetooth device, that would be pretty incredible even if it only went at a portion of my current speed/accuracy. Obviously, that's still sci fi at this point, but that's what you seem to be rejecting here. To each their own, I guess.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoI type only slightly.slower than I think, so really no keyboard interface would be worth my while.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoThis is a really good point, I work in an area that requires careful written communication. So sometimes my thought output is only five words per minute, and that includes multiple revisions which would look crazy using a brain interface. :)
- fnord77 5y agowill such an interface ever be possible without invasive implants in your brain?
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoDepending on how much precision you need, it's already possible. An external interface can read gross changes in electrical activity that a person can learn to control. But it's pathetic compared to what the nerves can do.
- carapace 5y agoYes. 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 technology to take the signals and transduce them to e.g. a byte-stream without surgery. First was Galvanic Skin Response, then when IMUs (Inertial Measurement Units) were miniaturized enough you could use those instead of GVR, nowadays (as I mentioned in a sib comment) you can use a camera and ML to recognize e.g. muscle twitches in the face or whole body. (I have no idea why people are not more interested in this angle, even BCI enthusiasts seem to have a blindspot here and just go on about surgery and implants. If anyone is interested, let me know and I can explain further. FWIW, I don't bother to do this myself because I can already type as fast as I need to. In fact, I was a hunt-and-peck typist for years! I'm not proud, just explaining why I don't bother to explore hypnotic low-tech BCI.)
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- computerlab 5y agoI’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).
- carapace 5y agoApologies to those who've heard it before, but whenever BCI comes up I feel obliged to point out that, when you connect a computer to a brain, the brain is the more sophisticated information processor. Use hypnosis. You can have effective fast communication to the machine without any fancy technology (and certainly without surgery!) The subjective experience is "think to type". I expect that these days you can use a camera and ML to "read thoughts" directly from facial muscles, no need for GVR or IMUs on the fingers.
- ramshanker 5y agoOnce 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 least 4x I guess. Currently to draw a line in AutoCAD, I have to either move the mouse to a "line" button and click it. OR type a command "line" if my hands are on keyboard. Now If I had a direct interface with the machine, just the the thought of "Draw a line" and software is line-drawing mode. Add eye tracking to it, and I simply look at the point on the screen when line shall start and say in my head "here"...... opportuties are endless. Computer will have difficult time catching up with the amount of commands we are capable of issuing to it. BRING IT ON. It was 2006, when I did Speec-To-Text data entry of 200+ mobile numbers using good old Windows XP. Progress seems to be have been too slow since than.
- whereis 5y agothe ideal CAD operator has a series of personalized single key shortcuts on their left hand. I challenge you to put your top ten commands on single key or double-same key (e.g. zz) shortcuts on the left side of the keyboard. Your CAD skills will speed up significantly once these become muscle memory.
- daveFNbuck 5y agoIf you're already able to do input faster than the computer can process your commands, how would a faster input method increase productivity?
- ramshanker 5y agoWell, 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.
- spollo 5y agoInteresting that the method for this interface was imagining writing the word, I guess too many random thoughts would enter your writing if it was just based on mental-verbalizing (saying it in your head). It would be really cool to have a BCI that runs off mental-verbalizing and have a chopper style rapper use it (eg. Busta Rhymes). Imagine people doing transcription learning chopping as skill to get an edge on their job!
- ckemere 5y agoLots of discussion of WPM speed. Prof. Shenoy presented at our weekly seminar (shameless plug - https://twitter.com/RiceNeuro 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.
- drbojingle 5y agoThe great thing about this is that with the proper use of snippets and auto completion 90 characters per minute can quickly translates to more than 18 wpm.
- twotwotwo 5y agoA 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/WillettEtAlNature2021-All.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/~shenoy/GroupPublications/WillettEtA...
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- justnotworthit 5y agoThe money shot: https://youtu.be/pcApwQxbagg?t=55 https://youtu.be/pcApwQxbagg?t=55
- hoppyhoppy2 5y agoPreviously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27134049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27134049
- nsonha 5y ago"brain-computer interface" and "typing" should not go in the same sentence