Feng Guo and his team at Indiana University Bloomington generated a brain organoid from stem cells, attached it to a computer chip, and connected their setup, Brainoware, to an AI tool.

This hybrid system could process, learn, and remember information. It was even able to carry out some rudimentary speech recognition.

 The work, published today in Nature Electronics, could one day lead to new bio-computers that are more efficient than conventional computers.

Guo said that this was a first demonstration of using brain organoids for computing.

“It's exciting to see the possibilities of organoids for biocomputing in the future."

His team wanted to use actual brain cells to send and receive information. When the researchers applied electrical stimulation to the hybrid system they'd built, Brainware responded to those signals, and its neural networks changed.

According to the researchers, this result suggests that the hybrid system processed information and could perhaps even perform computing tasks without supervision.

Guo and his colleagues then attempted to see if Brainoware could perform useful tasks. In one test, they used Brainoware to try to solve mathematical equations. They also gave it a benchmark test for speech recognition, using 240 audio clips of eight people pronouncing Japanese vowels.

The clips were converted into electrical signals and applied to the Brainware system. This generated signals in the neural networks of the brain organoid, which were then fed into an AI tool for decoding.

The brain organoid could decode the signals from the audio recordings, a form of speech recognition, but the accuracy was low.

Although the system improved with AI training, reaching about 78 per cent accuracy, it was still less accurate than artificial neural networks.

Lena Smirnova, an assistant professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, points out that brain organoids cannot truly hear speech but exhibit "a reaction" to electrical stimulation pulses from the audio clips.

The study did not demonstrate whether Brainoware can process and store information over the long term or learn multiple tasks. Generating brain cell cultures in a lab and maintaining them long enough to perform computations is a huge undertaking.