Facebook is working on reading your mind

San Francisco

FACEBOOK wants to read your mind - at least, when it comes to what you would like to say or type. The social network giant, at its annual developers conference on Wednesday, unveiled projects aimed at allowing users to use their minds to type messages or their skin to hear words.

"Speech is essentially a compression algorithm, and a lousy one at that," Facebook executive and former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) director Regina Dugan told a packed audience at the Silicon Valley event. "That is why we love great writers and poets, because they are just a little bit better at compressing the fullness of a thought into words. What if we could type directly from our brain into a computer?"