Now, Cognixion is bringing its AI communication app to the Vision Pro, which Forsland says has more functionality than the purpose-built Axon-R. “The Vision Pro gives you all of your apps, the app store, everything you want to do,” he says.

Apple opened the door to BCI integration in May, when it announced a new protocol to allow users with severe mobility disabilities to control the iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro without physical movement. Another BCI company, Synchron, whose implant is inserted into a blood vessel adjacent to the brain, has also integrated its system with the Vision Pro. (Apple is not known to be developing its own BCI)

In Cognixion’s trial, the company has swapped out Apple’s headband for its own, which is embedded with six electroencephalographic, or EEG, sensors. These collect information from the brain’s visual and parietal cortex, located at the back of the head. Specifically, Cognixion’s system identifies visual fixation signals, which occur when a person is maintaining their gaze on an object. This allows users to select from a menu of options in the interface using mental attention alone. A neural computing pack worn at the hip processes brain data outside of the Vision Pro.

“The philosophy of our approach is around reducing the amount of burden that is being generated by the person’s communication needs,” says Chris Ullrich, Cognixion’s chief technology officer.

Current communication tools can help but aren’t ideal. For instance, low-tech handheld letterboards allow patients to look at certain letters, words, or pictures so that a caregiver can guess their meaning, but they’re time-consuming to use. And eye tracking technology is still expensive and not always reliable.

“We actually build an AI for each individual participant that is customized with their history of speaking, their style of their humor, anything they’ve written, anything they’ve said, that we can gather. We crunch all that down into something that is a user proxy,” Ullrich says.

European proposals to require technology companies to scan the contents of communications sent through encrypted email and messaging services pose an “existential catastrophic risk”, it was claimed last night.

Encrypted messaging service Signal, which is widely used by governments, businesses and the public to send secure messaging services, warned that passing new legislation “negates the very purpose of encryption”.

The European Council is due to vote on Danish proposals on 14 October to mandate emailing and messaging services to install machine learning and scanning technology on mobile phones and computers to identify and report suspected child abuse images.

European Union (EU) member states are divided on the scheme, dubbed Chat Control, which has been widely criticised by cryptographers and security researchers who claim that mandatory scanning would create security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and hostile nation states.

Signal’s vice-president for global affairs, Udbhav Tiwari, said that if the proposals became law they would introduce “massive glaring vulnerabilities” into operating systems used on phones and computers.

“Malicious actors will start using this capability to gain access that would simply be unthinkable for them under the current security paradigms of how operating systems have been implemented,” he said.

Under the Danish proposals, technology companies would be required to introduce client-side scanning technologies that will use hash functions to identify known abuse images and machine learning algorithms to identify unknown images. One way to enforce it would be to require software companies to introduce scanning capabilities in widely used operating systems, such as Windows, Apple’s MacOS and iOS, and Google’s Android.