Advancing the future of speech prosthetics

Dr Oiwi Parker Jones is a Hugh Price Fellow in Computer Science at Jesus College and a Principal Investigator at the Oxford Robotics Institute.

Growing up with an intense interest in computers and brains and speaking an endangered language (Hawaiian) himself, Dr Parker Jones focused on Natural Language Processing for low-resource languages in his DPhil research.

As a postdoc, he then trained in Imaging Neuroscience and in Applied Artificial Intelligence.

Dr Parker Jones’ research group, the Parker Jones Neural Processing Lab (PNPL), is based in the Department of Engineering Science and weaves together the research threads of computers, brains, and language.

They come together in the vision of creating safe and effective Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) that can restore communication to profoundly paralysed patients, who may be unable to walk, feed themselves, speak or gesture effectively.

'They are,' Dr Parker Jones says, 'locked in their minds, passive witnesses to the world, but also conscious.'

The power of modern machine learning is key to the success of speech BCIs.

But leveraging this power requires data at an unusually large scale, and the financial support of partners such as the UK Medical Research Council, the Department of Engineering Science, and Jesus College, is vital to the success of the field.

One of the research group’s first breakthroughs was a proof of concept that involves two kinds of speech. Historically, there has been a wide gap in the literature between decoding results for overt (speaking aloud) and covert (inner) varieties of speech. Covert speech has proven significantly harder to decode.

In an early breakthrough the team were able to close the gap, to decode inner speech to the same level of accuracy as speaking aloud.

Dr Parker Jones highlights there is still much to do; the team’s initial breakthrough focused on a fragment of language. Their job now is to extend the result.

When asked what makes Oxford an attractive place to work, Dr Parker Jones is clear that the people are what makes the University stand out, along with its grounding in tradition and enthusiasm for the future.

Looking forward, he is excited to see how the emerging science of inner speech will shed light on the philosophical puzzle of “other minds”, based in the evidence so far that individuals experience inner speech in radically different ways.

'We are each familiar with our own subjective experiences,' Dr Parker Jones says, 'so it is natural to reason by analogy that others must experience verbal thought similarly.'

But outside of art and literature it seems that we know very little of what it’s like to be someone else, at least for now.

As a new team lead it is increasingly difficult to find funding and resources for international DPhil students, now including European students, and Dr Parker Jones fears we may miss out on a lot of talent.

He notes that funding is key to accelerate this exciting and cutting-edge field of research in which Oxford is positioned to play a significant role.