NLP And Brain-computer Interfaces At The European Patent Office

This article from MIT's technology review discusses a paper from a team at Stanford University titled "A high-performance speech neuroprosthesis" which was published as a preprint on bioRxiv (21 January 2023). The paper relates to translating the thoughts of a patient into text on a screen. These so-called brain-computer interfaces are particularly useful for sufferers of paralysis providing them the ability to communicate without the need to physically speak.

The team claim to have achieved new state-of-the-art performance at 62 words per minute decoded speech, "which is 3.4 times faster than the prior record" and "begins to approach the speed of natural conversation (160 words per minute)". The paper further claims a 9.1% word error rate on a 50 word vocabulary, and an astonishingly low 23.8% word error rate on a 150,000 word vocabulary.