Artificial intelligence gave a paralyzed woman her voice back

It sounds like a lot. Was just a thought experiment of how such spinal blocks/paralysis would affect deaf people and how they'd be able to continue to communicate with their deaf partners. Definitely niche but nonetheless interesting, and I think possible using the same general approach as the OP article.

But yeh to then translate gestures to speech is a distinct and incredibly challenging problem on its own as you allude to. Perhaps in the future they can tap into signing/speaking-translators' brains and have AI learn those mappings in a fuzzy way.

In fluent sign language, there is something analogous to phonemes. In linguistics these days, they're just called phonemes, and considered equivalent to spoken language phonemes. They're a fixed class of shapes and locations. They combine in certain ways that make up morphemes, which then make up words. It does work very similarly, perhaps identically, to spoken language.

The distribution of handshapes and they way they interact resembles spoken language. For example, it's somewhat hard to say "strengths" and people often produce a slurred "strengfs". The way it slurs together is rather predictable. It's very hard to say "klftggt", and so it just doesn't occur in natural language. Same with sign languages and hard-to-sign combinations.

Phonemes have an exact realization, but they also exist relative to each other, the distance and direction between them is important. This is probably part of why an American can fairly easily understand New Zealand English, despite nearly all of the vowels being different. Another analogy: in tonal languages, if there's a low flat tone, then 3 rising tones, then a low flat tone, that final low tone may be quite a bit higher than the first low tone -- but it will be interpreted as a low tone, as it is judged relative to the previous rising tone. Vowel qualities besides tone work the same way. And so do hand gestures.

There is a lot of variation by dialect/region/community in sign languages. More than in a language like English. This makes it more complicated, but it shouldn't be insurmountable. And of course, not all deaf people speak sign languages as their native language. They would struggle just as people who learn any other language later in life do.

...unless it could be trained on the individual?

It got revitalised again recently resulting in much commotion from people on either side of the fence: shock that someone might never hear their own voice or talk to themselves inside their head, and shock that someone might have this voice talking to themselves, for somebody who has only known silence.

I think there are a couple studies that back it up, but a lot is anecdotal as people describe their side of the fence.

I have an inner voice myself, but I have thoughts and sensations that my inner voice does not voice, and some where it does.

The human brain is so freaking cool.

Yes, just like it prevents the prosecution from bringing in a hair expert that will testify to the court that your hair was on the crime scene.

Yes, just like it prevents the prosecution from bringing in a blood splatter expert to testify to the court only you could make this specific splatter.

As you can see, truth or efficacy isn't a prerequisite of being admitted by the court.

“There is no crime or offense when the defendant was in a state of insanity at the time of offense, or when he was constrained by a force he could not resist.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9387428/

Forcing someone to do something without payment and to their own detriment should run afoul of both the 13th and 5th amendment respectively; but if it was already reasonably and obviously known that an encrypted drive contained CSAM or national security secrets, and you have already been duly convicted of that, then it would not apply ("except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted," ), and you can be coerced into the "labor" of decryption - although double jeopardy would seem to apply, so you cannot be further charged for anything found, once decrypted.

I suggest making your passwords themselves incriminating, just to throw in another constitutional hiccup.

Not that any of this would matter in practice, but it is quite a legal thought experiment.

What are we living in, a dystopian sci-fi universe?

Mere technical hurdles IMO.