A Speech Synthesizer Connected Directly to the Brain
From: Technology Review - 07/09/2014
By: Courtney Humphries

Brain-machine interfaces could restore speech to "locked-in" patients.

Could a person who is paralyzed and unable to speak, like physicist Stephen
Hawking, use a brain implant to carry on a conversation?

That's the goal of an expanding research effort at US universities, which
over the last five years has proved that recording devices placed under the
skull can capture brain activity associated with speaking.

While results are preliminary, Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University
of California, San Francisco, says he is working toward building a wireless
brain-machine interface that could translate brain signals directly into
audible speech using a voice synthesizer. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/528741/a-speech-synthesizer-direct-to-the-brain/

Links:
The Thought Experiment
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/528141/the-thought-experiment/

Functional organization of human sensorimotor cortex for speech articulation
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v495/n7441/full/nature11911.html

Stephen Hawking's Communication System
http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-computer.html

Neural Signals
http://www.neuralsignals.com/nsidnn/Home.aspx

Sounds of Silence (with video 3:12)
http://www.bu.edu/today/2009/sounds-of-silence-2/

A Prosthesis for Speech
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/410416/a-prosthesis-for-speech/

Direct classification of all American English phonemes using signals from
  functional speech motor cortex 
http://m.iopscience.iop.org/1741-2552/11/3/035015/article

Marc W. Slutzky
http://fsmweb.northwestern.edu/faculty/facultyprofile.cfm?xid=16463