, the same laboratory demonstrated a similar feat with a BCI that translated attempted speech. The team could then map phonemes—the building blocks of speech—and run them through an AI decoder to reconstitute the inner thoughts of the participants. Willett and his team found that the resulting patterns were similar to (though less robust than) those of attempted speech signals from the 2023 study. “Orange you glad I didn’t say banana”) that could switch the BCI on and off so that participants’ inner monologues remained private at their own discretion. “We found that we could decode these signals well enough to demonstrate a proof of principle, although still not as well as we could with attempted speech,” Willett said in a press statement.