08/01/2026
🧠🗣️BCI Award 1st place winner 2025: An Inner Speech Neuroprosthesis
What if people with paralysis could communicate at conversational speed — without attempting to physically speak? This work shows that purely imagined speech can power high-performance communication BCIs.
🧠 Highlights
• Decodes inner (imagined) speech directly from motor cortex
• Real-time RNN + language model decoding
• Up to 145 words/min (true conversational speed)
• Low error rates: 14% (50-word) and 26% (125k-word vocabulary)
• More comfortable and less fatiguing than attempted speech
• Includes safeguards to protect private, unintended inner speech
💡 Why it matters
Inner speech BCIs enable fast, natural, and private communication for people with ALS or stroke — overcoming key limitations of attempted-speech systems.
🔥 Inspired? Submissions for BCI Award 2026 are OPEN!
📅 Deadline: September 1st, 2026
💰 Total Prize: $6,000 USD
📖 Top 12 projects will be invited to publish in the BCI State-of-the-Art series by Springer
🔗 Details: www.bci-award.com/Home