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Speech Interfaces Got a Common Information Scale
Open-vocabulary mutual information compares neural speech decoders even when their datasets, vocabularies and recording setups differ.
Summary
Open-vocabulary mutual information compares neural speech decoders even when their datasets, vocabularies and recording setups differ.
Accuracy and word error rate can overstate communication when they score only the words a brain-computer interface already supports. OVMI instead measures conveyed information against a reference distribution of what a user may wish to say, putting coverage and decoding accuracy on the same scale. Applied to existing systems, it exposed vocabulary tradeoffs and found that selecting a vocabulary to maximize OVMI improved accuracy by as much as 16.3% across three speech domains.
Why it matters
Open-vocabulary mutual information compares neural speech decoders even when their datasets, vocabularies and recording setups differ.
Limits and context
- Accuracy and word error rate can overstate communication when they score only the words a brain-computer interface already supports.
Key claims
Open-vocabulary mutual information compares neural speech decoders even when their datasets, vocabularies and recording setups differ.
Qualification: Accuracy and word error rate can overstate communication when they score only the words a brain-computer interface already supports.
Evidence: source-2026-09-03-016
Sources
- arXiv preprint 2609.02887arXiv · primary research
Corrections
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