Scientists have built an 'electric tongue' using AI with human taste

AI is creeping into our lives more and more, and its long list of bizarre has included creating bizarre celebrity spoofs to 'hacking' dating apps and creating entire musical albums.

But its latest application might be the most surprising yet.

Scientists have created a new “electronic tongue” using a system powered by artificial intelligence which is designed with food safety in mind.

The device is the subject of a new study in the journal Nature.

The contraption, which is designed to test the freshness of foods, uses an ion-sensitive field-effect transistor to act as an artificial tongue.

In turn, the artificial neural network powered by AI was used to act as a replacement for the region in the brain which perceives taste – the gustatory cortex.

Saptarshi Das is an engineer at Penn State University and study co-author. Das said: "We’re trying to make an artificial tongue, but the process of how we experience different foods involves more than just the tongue.

"We have the tongue itself, consisting of taste receptors that interact with food species and send their information to the gustatory cortex — a biological neural network."

The research involved using the artificial neural network to help identify acidity, and it had an accuracy of more than 95 per cent in its analysis.

Further application showed that the device could tell the difference between different soft drinks and blends of coffee.

It could also find harmful per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in water.

"We found that the network looked at more subtle characteristics in the data — things we, as humans, struggle to define properly,” Das said in a statement. “And because the neural network considers the sensor characteristics holistically, it mitigates variations that might occur day-to-day."

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