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During the May 9 Olympic Torch Relay in France, a torch bearer with a motor disability (pictured here) used a new generation neural interface powered by Generative AI to control her arm’s exoskeleton with her brainwaves and facial expressions.

Sports are just the start. If Inclusive Brains, the French startup behind the technology, has its way, its brain-computer interface technology will be a game changer, transforming the workplace as we know it through mind reading. It is a shift that, done right, promises to make work more inclusive and help employees to be more productive and less stressed.

Just days before the torchbearer gave a very public demonstration of its technology Inclusive Brains announced a partnership with trade credit insurer Allianz Trade to further develop Prometheus, a brain-machine interface that transforms diverse neurophysiological data (brainwaves, heart activity, facial expressions, eye-movements) into mental commands. The goal of this innovative assistive technology is to help individuals who can no longer use their hands or speak, to operate workstations and to navigate digital environments without the need to type on a keyboard, to touch a screen, or to use vocal commands.

Eventually, Allianz Trade and Inclusive Brains say they will accelerate the development of AI-powered assistive solutions that give people with disabilities more autonomy and facilitate their access to the workforce.

It is literally the embodiment of AI for Good, says co-founder Professor Olivier Oullier, co-founder & CEO, Inclusive Brains and Chairman, Institute for Artificial Intelligence by Biotech Dental. Oullier, a neuroscientist turned AI entrepreneur, and Paul Barbaste, a cyber security and AI expert, founded the company in 2022 with an ambitious and clear mission: to leverage the combination of Generative AI and Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) to improve the inclusion of people who lost the ability to move because of life accidents or neurodegenerative diseases. Disability affects more than one billion individuals globally. Some 50 million suffer from quadriplegia preventing them from studying or working.

The multimodal AI agents at the core of this neurotechnology are starting to be used to collect data about employees’ stress levels and improve performance in the workplace, says Oullier. He says Inclusive Brains is already piloting the technology for this purpose, with positive results.

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Corsound AI, an Israeli startup, focuses on voice intelligence, including a unique capability known as voice-to-face technology. This technology automatically generates a facial sketch from just a few seconds of a voice sample and allows voice-to-face corrolation, enabling the matching between a voice and a face image even without a database. The company additionally offers advanced deepfake detection and other voice analysis solutions to its customers, which include financial institutions and law enforcement.

“We provide voice intelligence solutions to address security challenges and to stop fraud in real time while assuring a smooth customer experience,” says CEO Gal Haselkorn, who has more than 25 years of experience in sales and strategic business development in the high-tech sector.

Academic research in 2019 at the U.S.’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) established that there is a correlation between our voices and our faces. Every person has a unique voice print, just like his unique fingerprint. And every voice has a face. This correlation enables identifying gender, age, ethnicity, skin tone, nose and jaw shape, and more, from just a voice sample. Corsound AI utilizes this correlation to generate a face sketch using its unique AI technology.

“With a high rate of accuracy, our technology can analyze short audio samples to determine the person behind the voice,” says Haselkorn. “There is a growing need by organizations for new methods of verification, especially in the era of AI voice-based scams. Traditional voice recognition methods and solutions are no longer sufficient. Organizations serving customers must implement additional layers of protection.”

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