A high-performance speech neuroprosthesis

Abstract Speech brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) have the potential to restore rapid communication to people with paralysis by decoding neural activity evoked by attempted speech into text 1,2 or sound 3,4 . Early demonstrations, although promising, have not yet achieved accuracies sufficiently high for communication of unconstrained sentences from a large vocabulary 1–7 . Here we demonstrate a speech-to-text BCI that records spiking activity from intracortical microelectrode arrays. Enabled by these high-resolution recordings, our study participant—who can no longer speak intelligibly owing to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—achieved a 9.1% word error rate on a 50-word vocabulary (2.7 times fewer errors than…

• UD
  U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

  Award: A2295R
• OO
  Office of Research and Development
• WT
  Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, Stanford University
• NI
  National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders

  Awards: U01-DC017844, DC017844