What if I told you that you could control Siri with your mind? I know, I’d look a bit crazy, and you might call me a looney, but some guys have developed some superb technology. They have a device that when attached to your head through a few sensors allows you to communicate with your phone by thought. Don’t believe me? Check out the video below!
According to their blog, here’s what they did:
1. ECG pads provide raw skin conductivity / electrical activity as analogue data (0-5v).
2. This is plugged into the Arduino board via 4 analogue inputs (no activity = 0v, high activity = 5v).
3. The Arduino has a program burnt to it’s EPROM chip that filters the signals.
4. Josh trained the program by thinking of the main Siri commands (“Call”, “Set”, “Diary” etc.) one at a time and the program where we captured the signature brain patterns they produce.
5. The program can detect the signature patterns that indicate a certain word is being thought of. The program will then wait for a natural ‘release’ in brain waves and assume the chain of commands is now complete and action is required.
6. The series of commands are fed to a SpeakJet speech synthesiser chip
7. The audio output of which simply plugs into the iPhone’s microphone jack.
In short, they attached a bunch of sensors to their head, trained some chips to recognize certain brain waves, these brain waves get turned into voice by a speech synthesizer chip, with the out put being sent to the microphone jack. It requires no jailbreak.
The device is still in its prototype stage, and one of the main drawbacks is that it needs a computer. It isn’t very portable either, the prototype features a bulky logic board with a bunch of chips on it.
If this really is a working prototype (Gizmodo can’t determine if it is a fake) I’d love to see it be mass produced. Who knows, it might even help users with heavy accents use Siri effectively.
