How can hawking speak

Artificial intelligence helped make the system faster. Frustrated with the speed at which he could communicate, Hawking reached out to Intel, which had in the past provided him with the computers he used to speak.

His argument was that it would be difficult to predict what an AI that was able to evolve itself would want, presuming that it would naturally be predisposed to gather more resources to sustain itself.

In that case, it would rival humans for the finite amount of resources on the planet. But even if evil AI were averted, Hawking still saw a problem with autonomous technology: Wealth distribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. By , he managed only about one or two words per minute, so he sent a letter to Moore, saying: "My speech input is very, very slow these days.

Is there any way Intel could help? Rattner assembled a team of experts on human-computer interaction from Intel Labs, which he brought over to Cambridge for Hawking's 70th birthday conference, "The State of the Universe," on January 8, We hope that this team has a breakthrough and identifies a technique that allows him to communicate at levels he had a few years ago. Hawking had been too ill to attend his own birthday party, so he met the Intel experts some weeks later at his office in the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge.

She told me that people in wheelchairs can still do amazing things. Looking back, I realize how prophetic that was. After the Intel team introduced themselves, Haussecker took the lead, explaining why they were there and what their plans were.

Haussecker continued speaking for 20 minutes, when, suddenly, Hawking spoke. It took him 20 minutes to write a salutation of about 30 words.

It stopped us all in our tracks. It was poignant. We now realized that this was going to be a much bigger problem than we thought. At the time, Hawking's computer interface was a program called EZ Keys, an upgrade from the previous softwares and also designed by Words Plus.

It provided him with a keyboard on the screen and a basic word-prediction algorithm. A cursor automatically scanned across the keyboard by row or by column and he could select a character by moving his cheek to stop the cursor. EZ Keys also allowed Hawking to control the mouse in Windows and operate other applications in his computer. He surfed the web with Firefox and wrote his lectures using Notepad.

He also had a webcam that he used with Skype. The Intel team envisaged an upheaval of Hawking's archaic system, which would involve introducing new hardware. Gaze tracking couldn't lock on to Hawking's gaze, because of the drooping of his eyelids. Before the Intel project, Hawking had tested EEG caps that could read his brainwaves and potentially transmit commands to his computer.

Somehow, they couldn't get a strong enough brain signal. They weren't able to get a strong enough signal-to-noise. After returning to Intel Labs and after months of research, Denman prepared a minute video to send to Hawking, delineating which new user-interface prototypes they wanted to implement and soliciting his feedback.

The changes included additions such as a "back button," which Hawking could use not only to delete characters but to navigate a step back in his user interface; a predictive-word algorithm; and next-word navigation, which would let him choose words one after another rather than typing them.

The main change, in Denman's view, was a prototype that tackled the biggest problem that Hawking had with his user interface: missed key-hits. It was unbearably slow and he would get frustrated. He's not somebody who just wants to get the gist of the message across.

He's somebody who really wants it to be perfect. To address the missed key-hits, the Intel team added a prototype that would interpret Hawking's intentions, rather than his actual input, using an algorithm similar to that used in word processing and mobile phones. The problem is that it takes a little time to get used to and you have to release control to let the system do the work.

Intel had a dedicated team of engineers to help him cope with his communication process and the software is updated frequently to cope with his deteriorating control over his muscles.

The software moved a cursor across rows and columns of letters and Hawking could select the desired letter by twitching his cheek. Words and sentences are formed by selecting individual letters. And the software went on to predict and auto-fill the words he often used and thereby giving him further simplified process.

The software developed specially for Hawking also learned to analyze the content of a specific book or lecture he was working on to further simplify the process. The speech synthesizer gave out the sentence once it is completed.