Why does a brain-computer interface for speech need a language model? · Grey Matter

A few hundred electrodes see only part of what the speech cortex does, so the neural decoder's guesses at each sound are often wrong or uncertain.

Why does a brain-computer interface for speech need a language model?

A few hundred electrodes see only part of what the speech cortex does, so the neural decoder's guesses at each sound are often wrong or uncertain. A language model knows which sequences of words are likely in English and picks, among the many sentences compatible with those noisy guesses, the one that makes sense, much as a listener understands a mumbled sentence. In the 2024 system this last stage helped take word accuracy to 97.5 %; the price is that rare names and unusual phrasing are harder to get through.