Said
Beanie, Sabi’s hat that reads thoughts
Forget the keyboard and forget the saying: a Californian startup claims it will launch a wool hat that allows you to write with just your thoughts — and wants the first copies to be in use before the end of the year.
In the future, cyborgs could be in fashion — and go unnoticed among ordinary mortals. The Californian startup is developing a beanie-shaped device capable of convert thoughts to text.
According to , the Sabi project is being developed with the support of the venture capital investor Vinod Khoslawhich entered OpenAI’s first investment round.
The beanie, which Sabi presents as “a cyborg-like wearable device for everyone”, is in practice an EEG equipment — the classic method of capturing brain waves with metal discs placed against the scalp.
EEG has been used for decades in sleep laboratories and epilepsy clinics. THE The problem is that the skin and skull muffle the signalso readings taken from the outside of the head were never clear enough to capture continuous inner speech.
Sabi’s bet is brute force. Most “helmets” used in EEG have between a dozen and a few hundred sensors. Sabi is incorporating among 70,000 and 100,000 tiny sensorswhich amplify the signal received from the brain.
According to the startup’s CEO, Rahul Chhabraneural readings are end-to-end encrypted before leaving the cap — the security of which is being audited by researchers at Stanford University.
To train the “cap”, the company collected around 100 thousand hours of recordings from a group of 100 volunteers. The company’s objective is that the equipment can process 30 words per minute.
It does not seem. Very. Fast. But in fact, a word every two seconds is on par with what most , or BCI, projects have been achieving in recent years.
According to Khosla, a wearable device is the only way we will one day have a billion people using a brain-computer interface. “If we want a billion people to use a BCI to access their computers every day, cannot be invasive“.
Very good. But then in the summer we will have to walk the streets with a hat on our heads? Don’t worry, Sabi is already preparing a version of its BCI in cap shape.
