A brain implant turns intended speech into text at conversational speed

A person who can no longer speak tries to, and the implant reads the brain's instructions to the mouth and throat and turns them into words on a screen. In August 2023 two groups reported people with paralysis producing sixty to eighty words a minute this way, from large vocabularies, which is within sight of the hundred and fifty of ordinary conversation. It is the fastest a brain has yet talked to a machine, and the first point on this branch's bandwidth series.

What would count

A person who cannot speak intelligibly, through an implanted brain interface, produces text from attempted speech at forty words a minute or more from a vocabulary of a thousand words or more, with the error rate stated, in a peer-reviewed report.

Who settles it: Peer-reviewed reports giving the words per minute, the vocabulary size and the error rate

Where it stands

First human. Reached on 23 August 2023, on the record of doi.org. Could move a stage within 1 to 5 years.

What it rests on

Needs a first human of: A wired brain implant lets a paralysed person control a cursor.

Needed before: A brain link carries more information per second than speech.

The last reading

Once a week every upgrade is read against the news, against what would count above. Open a line to see what that week held. Every reading of this upgrade is on this week's reading.

• 16 October 2026 Nothing new

  Nothing in the window. The searches returned the two August 2023 Nature reports (62 and 78 words a minute) and the 2025 Berkeley and UCSF streaming-voice report, all already on the rung this entry holds; no faster figure and nothing toward a regulator's approval.

Notes

The record is the Stanford report of 62 words a minute from a 125,000-word vocabulary; a San Francisco report published the same day reached 78 words a minute and drove a talking avatar. The first decoding of attempted speech in a paralysed person, in 2021, managed about fifteen words a minute from fifty words; a 2024 report cut the error rate to a few per cent. These figures, with their units as the papers give them, are the seed of the bandwidth series.