From Neurons to Conversation: Speech Brain-Computer Interfaces

Abstract

Speech brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) aim to restore communication by transforming neural activity related to speech, language, or communicative intent into external outputs such as text, synthesized voice, or avatar control. Recent advances in intracortical and electrocorticographic recording, deep sequence models, and language-model-assisted decoding have enabled rapid progress, including high-performance attempted-speech decoding and increasingly naturalistic speech synthesis. Yet these achievements also reveal that speech BCIs are not simply neural-to-text decoders. They are adaptive clinical systems in which neural representations, recording hardware, decoding architectures, language priors, feedback, and user learning interact over time. Here, we synthesize speech BCI research from a system-level perspective. We first examine the neural substrates of speech and language, emphasizing their hierarchical, distributed, temporally structured, and non-stationary organization. We then examine recording and decoding choices, closed-loop adaptation, evaluation, clinical translation, and ethics. Across these domains, we highlight recurring trade-offs between signal resolution and invasiveness, low-level motor and high-level semantic targets, decoder accuracy and user agency, and language-model fluency and faithful neural evidence. We argue the next generation of speech BCIs should be evaluated not only by offline accuracy, but also by robustness across sessions, calibration burden, latency, uncertainty, usability, and safeguards against unintended decoding. By reframing speech BCIs as adaptive, user-centred systems, we outline the interdisciplinary priorities spanning speech neuroscience, neural engineering, machine learning, clinical practice, and neuroethics needed to move from proof-of-concept decoding toward reliable, expressive, and controllable communication neuroprostheses.