Scientists say they have created a new device that can turn brain signals into electronic speech. The invention could one day give people who have lost the ability to speak a better way of communicating than current methods. The device was developed by researchers from the University of California, San Francisco. Their results were recently published in a study in the journal Nature. Scientists created a “brain machine interface” that is implanted in the brain. The device was built to read and record brain signals that help control the muscles that produce speech. These include the lips, larynx, tongue and jaw. The experiment involved a two-step process. First, the researchers used a “decoder” to turn electrical brain signals into representations of human vocal movements. A synthesizer then turns the representations into spoken sentences.