Facebook Thinks the Most Useful Digital Assistant Is the One That Can Read
  Minds
From: Quartz - 10/09/2017
By: W. Harry Fortuna

Cheryl Dugan, head of Facebook's Building 8 moonshot division, says the
company wants to use existing brain-computer interface (BCI) technology to
create a product that will enable people to type with their minds. Building 8
researcher Mark Chevillet notes Facebook set out on this project because
users are hesitant to ask personal digital assistants questions in public.
Facebook wants to develop a digital assistant that can privately listen to
the user's thoughts. Chevillet highlights, as a proof of concept, the work of
Christian Herff at the University of Bremen in Germany showing limited but
promising results when it comes to translating thoughts to typing. In Herff's
study, subjects were limited to only 10 words, and were told to speak them
out loud. The computer was able to read and translate the brain signals
accurately about 75 percent of the time. However, Facebook's goal is to
achieve 100 words per minute, relaying words silently directly from a user's
brain.

Read the entire article at:
https://qz.com/1087435/facebooks-play-on-the-digital-assistant-market-may-hinge-on-telepathy

Links:
Brain-computer interface advance allows fast, accurate typing by people with
  paralysis (with video 3:04)
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2017/02/brain-computer-interface-allows-fast-accurate-typing-by-people-with-paralysis.html

Towards direct speech synthesis from ECoG: A pilot study.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28268620

Automatic Speech Recognition from Neural Signals: A Focused Review
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2016.00429/full

Facebook Announces "Typing-by-Brain" Project
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/bionics/facebook-announces-typing-by-brain-project