Fact · Voice and AI
62words per minute
A brain-computer interface decoded one participant's attempted speech into text at 62 words per minute, with a 23.8 percent word error rate on a 125,000-word vocabulary.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“Our participant’s attempted speech was decoded at 62 words per minute, which is 3.4 times as fast as the previous record”
A high-performance speech neuroprosthesis, Francis R. Willett et al., Nature, 2023, Abstract.
Open the original (DOI 10.1038/s41586-023-06377-x)- What it measures
- A single participant with ALS used intracortical electrode arrays. The paper compares the result with natural conversation at about 160 words per minute.
- What it does not show
- One person, an implanted device and an error rate of nearly one word in four. Not a consumer product.