Thought-to-speech machine, City Nature Challenge, Science of Storytelling

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Patients who suffer neurological impairments preventing them from speaking potentially face a severely limited existence. Being able to express yourself in real time is a large part of our identity. In the journal Nature this week, scientists from the University of California, San Francisco, report a new technique for synthesising speech based on measurements of neural signals taken from the brain. Author Dr Gopala Anumanchipalli tells Adam about how this proof of principle could one day form the basis for a speech prosthesis for patients who have lost the ability to converse. Around the world this weekend (April 26th-29th 2019) people are being encouraged to participate in the City Nature Challenge, a global effort to catalogue urban wildlife using a free mobile app. Reporter Geoff Marsh travelled to the California Academy of Sciences, home of the initiative, to meet those behind it and how we might all take part. The third act in our drama is a chat with journalist and writer Will Storr about his new book - the Science of Storytelling - which explores the structure of stories with relation to our evolution and brain structure. Primeval instincts of expectation, subversion and causation intertwine with camp-fire sagas from the beginning of conversation. What can this science of storytelling contribute to the art of telling stories about science? A ripping yarn indeed. Producer: Alex Mansfield

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service.
0:04.7	Join me as I serve up personal conversations with my sensational guests.
0:08.8	Do a leap interviews, Tim Cook.
0:11.2	Technology doesn't want to be good or bad.
0:15.0	It's in the hands of the creator.
0:16.7	It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room.
0:20.7	If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes, you're doing the wrong thing.
0:26.0	Julie, at your service, listen to all episodes on BBC Sales. B.
0:33.0	B. C Sounds Music Radio Podcasts
0:36.0	Hello you, this is Inside Science from BBC Radio 4.
0:40.0	First broadcast on the 25th of April 2019. I'm not Adam Rutherford. I'm a voice
0:45.8	synthesizer called Graham. Or I can be a voice synthesizer called Charles
0:51.1	except that I now sound ridiculous and weirdly a bit like an rumor
0:55.0	quite enough of that for now more on voice synthesizers in just a second we've also
0:59.8	got Californian slugs and snails no puppy-duggs tales alas in a citizen science project to catalogue
1:05.9	the critters that live with us in cities. And a story because we humans are story telling machines evolved to process information with
1:14.9	beginnings, middles and ends. We take a look at how our brains and minds introduce
1:19.6	structures of the world by telling stories. But first, obviously this is not me talking,
1:25.0	but an online voice synthesizer called Graham.
1:28.0	I type in the text and it converts it to Graham's electronic voice.
1:32.0	That requires a fair degree of computer power. sit to Graham's electronic voice.
1:32.8	That requires a fair degree of computer power to do something most of us find incredibly
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